Royal Road - Read Stories

I really like RR and the ap is easier than the web to use. I know I should just pay for what I use but the ads are insufferable. You have a choice between an ad bar at the top of the page that doesn’t respect dark mode (so it’s often bright white), and also has moving elements (!!!) that make the ap completely unusable for me. Including bright light in my eyes and dancing graphics a few cm from where I’m trying to read?! Really? Or, you can choose the occasional long ad that comes between chapters. You can’t skip out of it, it takes you out of the app to the ap store, and it uses the volume full blast! I mean seriously?! The number of times it has come on blaring when I’m reading in bed next to my sleeping husband… it’s frankly rude of me to continue using it. It just happened again, which inspired me to write this review. Now I just need to decide if I should pony up and buy the stupid ap or just stop using it so I both stop bothering other people and giving myself an adrenaline inducing jump scare right when I’m trying to fall asleep at night.

As a reader and writer who’s been making use of Royal Road for months by now, the app is decent. If you only plan on using RR to read stories, it’s perfect. At the moment though, that’s the main thing it has going for it. It provides a better reading experience due to decreased lag, as long as you don’t mind a smaller screen. If you want to try your hand at writing, or interact on the forums, you still have to use the website. For most users it probably won’t be an issue, but it would be nice to have access to RR’s writing tools from the app. It could also provide a nice safety net for authors that way: if you try to save a draft while you don’t have Wi-Fi, maybe a pop up could let you save the data to your device as a temporary measure. All in all, I think it’s worth the download, especially since the devs are likely to polish it further and possibly implement more features as time goes on.

Honest, I’m crazy happy that they finally came out with an app. I’ve been using Royal Road for over 6 years and I have had the joy to see many many stories come and go from The Wandering Inn to The Mother of Learning. The website has hosted so many good stories, but using it in chrome and then DuckDuckGo for the last couple of years has been a little annoying. Having all my favorite stories like the Mark of the Fool more accessible for a phone user is really great. So far what I have seen from the use I have given the app has been really good. It was super easy to change the settings to how I had them on the website and it’s been fairly intuitive on how to operate the app so far. The search function has seemed to be given a huge facelift which is a real bonus when trying to find good things to read in a specific category. One of my gripes with the app so far that has kept me from moving to it so far is that for the iPhone 13 Pro Max, or at least mine so far, the full screen mode doesn’t seem to work. I am conflating fullscreen with landscape mode, which may not be the case to be fair. If there is a specific setting to enable landscape I haven’t been able to find it so far with a little bit of hunting through the app. One addition that may be beneficial is a support tab on the app, just like the website, where glitches and bugs can be submitted so that the developers are aware of them as they crop up. So far I haven’t found an option anywhere for something like that, but overall it’s been really nice. I haven’t fully migrated yet due to app not going landscape, my preferred method of reading on my phone, when in use, but once that gets fixed/ added I’ll be exclusively using the app since it’ll be way more convenient than the website for me.