LINKcat Mobile

When it’s not randomly booting me out, freezing, or unable to load data, it’s not bad. Unlike other apps, when you need to log back in, you can’t automatically pull up your saved passwords, so I’m cursing the app at least monthly for that. Putting books on hold is easy; I really appreciate that. But adding books to a wishlist is unintuitive and complicated. (I see there is now a little bookmark symbol at the top of the screen for adding books to a wishlist, but it freezes the app and requires closing & reopening the app.) The search options are also shaved down; you can’t search for titles in a specific language, for example. And to top it all off, there is no way within the app to contact the developer to report bugs or request improvements.

It's fine when it's working, which is rare. I've had to constantly log in & out to be able to search. Now today it's not recognizing my login at all. Using the website via desktop is fine. This app is always full of bugs. More of a pain to use it than anything.

The app has most of the basic features users would expect, except for user lists being completely missing. However, the UI feels like it was developed a decade ago. A couple examples: When opening an activity from the dashboard, there’s a very weird and unintuitive transition as a navigation controller appears, and when we press back to return to the dashboard. Also, it takes one tap from the homepage to open local newspaper indexes, and two taps to see what books I have on hold, even though seeing what books I have on hold is a *way* more common activity for an average library user. Finally, if an item is on hold and can’t be renewed, the renew button is still visible, but when it is clicked an alert pops up saying that the item can’t be renewed. Why show this button in the first place? It makes no sense. In general, this would be better laid out as a tab bar application, with the dashboard being a tab (or even some dashboard activities having their own tabs, like checked out and holds) and the other activities on the home screen that are most commonly used as other tabs. Also, the “keep signed in” checkbox is only intermittently effective, I’m sometimes logged out after I use the app.