Logos Library is Amazing, Mobile use is not.
Comments
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What aspects of the L8 mobile app can we improve? How can we make it better for you?
Right now, the app's stability needs to be restored. At present, it's approaching unusability. I'm on 8.0.3, and yesterday I still got the: won't turn the page; blank screen; hang; then crash behavior that we've seen since the 8.x was released.
As I've stated elsewhere including in my issue reports from within the app, I've been using the app heavily, daily, for 6+ years - all through seminary and as part of weekly sermon preparation, devotion, and study. There have been long-standing idiosyncrasies that I find frustrating. But nothing that made the app unusable.
Now I don't know if I can rely on it. I hesitate when I think about picking up my iPad to do tasks as simple as reading. The problems I described above occur when all I'm doing is reading. No highlighting or notes, no lookups, no guides, none of that. I can't even confidently read without encountering showstopper bugs.
If those problems can't be fixed, all the enhancements in the world won't mean anything.
Donnie
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It is not feasible mostly it feels like because FL doesn’t want to do it, at one point it was even hinted the mobile versions being phased out in favour of the web app. Now I know all features on mobile may be asking too much but programs like Olivetree’s BibleReader offers great passage guide functions very well. The web app is no answer because until you have a way to download the web app and resources to use offline it is dead in the water as a useful alternative.
-dan
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[:D]
I agree with what the others have said.
It is very close to being unusable.
I try to highlight and it takes three or four times to get that done. If I try to move on after it fails to highlight then it crashes the app.
Sometimes when I try to swipe between 3 or 4 books the pages that represent the book turn black and the app becomes unusable.
It seems to me like the app was released without being tested. You folks at Logos should have the app installed in your devices and work on it an hour per day then maybe you won’t need to ask us all of the time what’s wrong with it.
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It is not feasible mostly it feels like because FL doesn’t want to do it
Actually I don't think that. In fact, the new UI for the Logos 8 Homepage, that is so dysfunctional compared to L7, is the way it is exactly because that is how it needs to look on small mobile screens. And from watching the forums I think FL hears the message loud and clear that an increasing percentage of users not only wants to read on their mobile devices, but also to study, to prepare sermons/other content and to deliver this content. They just have to balance what they can do on such devices in terms of storage size and processing power (which makes it much much easier to run stuff on the Logos server and just show the results - as the Web App does - and permanent connectivity is something many of those demographics enjoy or rather take for granted).
The partial rewrite and redesign of Logos for L8 - which happened without a need to do so from a pure desktop perspective - makes only sense for me under the assumption that it prepares the way for feature parity across the platforms. Thus I see that FL wants to cater to the mobile group even to the extent that they make some of their desktop users very unhappy. The strategic focus is in your direction, guys!
Have joy in the Lord!
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at one point it was even hinted the mobile versions being phased out in favour of the web app
Not sure where this was hinted at, but there's no truth to this rumour that I know of.
If anything, it's the opposite. Visit app.logos.com on your iPhone and the banner across the top will prompt you to install the mobile app!
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Right now, the app's stability needs to be restored. At present, it's approaching unusability. I'm on 8.0.3, and yesterday I still got the: won't turn the page; blank screen; hang; then crash behavior that we've seen since the 8.x was released.
We have several reports of locked scrolling and blank screens on iOS. Please know that our team is actively working on this. It's particularly difficult to repro and isolate. We'll submit a fix to Apple asap.
As I've stated elsewhere including in my issue reports from within the app, I've been using the app heavily, daily, for 6+ years - all through seminary and as part of weekly sermon preparation, devotion, and study. There have been long-standing idiosyncrasies that I find frustrating. But nothing that made the app unusable.
Thanks for sticking with us for so long. I bet you've had quite the journey over the last 6 years. Tech has changed a lot. Mobile remains a huge priority for us, and we're investing more now than we every have before.
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I see much attention is given to the Logos Library running on PC than the Mobile App for there has been updates now and then on the PC version to make sure it's running good I know that because I have install the PC version on a PC in the office, i don't own PC what I have is iPad pro 2016, so I don't have the PC in the office all to myself. To the the Mobile App to my view is given little attention. Yet what we must remember is that the world we live in today has become mobile, I cannot carry a desktop PC with me every where but with my iPad or Tablet i can carry every where, And for that matter most people have chosen iPad or Tablet instead of a PC.
I am in Africa, and i can tell you the internet is not everywhere we most time go places and spent months, how do i study, it becomes pain in studying in areas where there are no internet. I complained to a friend and he introduced Logos Mobile App competitor to me, at that time he introduce that Mobile App to me they had put out an advertisement that "FREE FROM WIFI" explaining that they have build their app in way that one can study every where not worrying about internet , in fact I tried it on his iPad and everything work fine offline. And I wondered why can't this work with Logos Mobile App.
Then a thought came to me "may be Logos Bible make money when we are online." if that's the case please give us full functionality and sell the app and we will buy because i love Logos.
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in fact I tried it on his iPad and everything work fine offline. And I wondered why can't this work with Logos Mobile App.
I don't know about competitor products but I do agree we need better offline functionality. Some has arrived in the last year and hopefully more will come.
Then a thought came to me "may be Logos Bible make money when we are online." if that's the case please give us full functionality and sell the app and we will buy because i love Logos.
I don't really know what this means
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What aspects of the L8 mobile app can we improve? How can we make it better for you?
Please, please provide a copy bible verses tool. This is a major challenge for me because I like to work on iPad on my notes and I insert verses constantly and there is no clean way to do that with the current app. It would be really nice extra to have copy bible verses available with x-callback-url functionality as well so Logos could be used in a workflow on the iPad. This is so simple but needed so I'm curious how others accomplish this on iPad?
Beyond that, as much offline functionality as possible. Between airplanes and traveling the mobile app is frustrating to use. Sometimes even on wifi things don't work right. It feels like it's designed for constant high speed internet and a lot of the world doesn't have this.
I would be very grateful if we at least had the ability to do two things:
1. A simple word lookup meaning the ability to see the original language behind an English word and open one of my lexicons lexicon. Basically the functionality you have on a right click on the desktop version.
2. A simple ability to search a reference and see a list of commentaries from my library that have matches. In other words, the top part of the passage guide.
Other things like an inline interlinear would also be awesome
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What aspects of the L8 mobile app can we improve? How can we make it better for you?
I can't believe I forgot this in my other post, but keyboard shortcuts for everything would be a huge help. While I would have never guessed this a few years ago, power users on the iPad are working as much as possible via keyboard shortcuts. Many of the best apps on iPad have very robust keyboard shortcuts which eliminate the need to touch the screen very much. While it seems counterintuitive it really makes the iPad an excellent productivity platform.
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+1 for this idea. Keyboard shortcuts are key to serious iPad use.
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Please see my post here for the bugs reported: L8 iOS BUG (scrolling, highlighting) HOW TO REPRODUCE - DEV TEAM please read!!!
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What aspects of the L8 mobile app can we improve? How can we make it better for you?
Let me add just a bit to this-it's key to be able to integrate Logos on the iPad to easily share information with other apps. For example, I mentioned copy bible verses. I desperately need a feature like this. Ideally also exposed through Siri Shortcuts so I can integrate it into workflows with other apps I use for writing and research. Also, the ability to get a proper citation when I copy a quote out of a book like you do on Logos desktop. Finally, the ability to export out information. For example, when I'm working on a project, I frequently export a search to csv format and pull it into Numbers and create a proper spreadsheet to do analysis on that set of verses. On iOS I don't have any way to share information and get it into a spreadsheet or doc for further analysis or as part of a bigger project.
If we had the ability to easily share data out of iOS as on desktop that would be a big help. Right now the core apps I use are pretty much fully functional on iOS and it would be a big help to my workflow for logos to be fully functional and by that I do not mean every function that's on desktop, but a reasonable core functionality that works off and online.
Thanks for listening!
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“It is very close to being unusable.
I try to highlight and it takes three or four times to get that done. If I try to move on after it fails to highlight then it crashes the app.“
While myapp has has yet to crash ALL other aspects mentioned here apply to my situation as well.
Bib
Bob Deacon
Ipad Air 2 (ios 9.7 (0014)
Windows 11 inside edition
Samsung S23
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What aspects of the L8 mobile app can we improve? How can we make it better for you?
I can't believe I forgot this in my other post, but keyboard shortcuts for everything would be a huge help. While I would have never guessed this a few years ago, power users on the iPad are working as much as possible via keyboard shortcuts. Many of the best apps on iPad have very robust keyboard shortcuts which eliminate the need to touch the screen very much. While it seems counterintuitive it really makes the iPad an excellent productivity platform.
This is very important to iPad users!
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Hi Daniel! While I would happily take as much functionality as it's possible to provide, the main thing I wish for right now is just for the books I've downloaded to be accessible if I lose my internet connectivity. As it is, the mobile app basically stops working if I can't stay connected to the internet. The wifi at my church is spotty sometimes, and when that happens, I can't use the Logos app at all, even to use a Bible that I've downloaded. I thought the point of downloading resources was so that they would be available offline. If this is not true, is there any point to downloading them?
I'm a huge fan of all things Logos, but I hope that the mobile app can be improved to at least provide minimal functionality when offline. Thank you and the whole Logos team for the fantastic things you do!
Bob
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This is without doubt the worst aspect of the system. It has been brought up over and over. The earlier comments were "what do you expect from a free product". I think they have been extremely slow to recognize that mobile is the product for many people. I guessing the architecture doesn't take that into account and so it is a difficult thing to solve.
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Ditto on the errors Mattillo reports!
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On my iOS device, it is very difficult to select any text close to a hyperlinked Scripture Reference (either in the line above or underneath). It usually opens the long-press options menu for Scripture references, even though I long-pressed on some text in a different line. This really hinders smooth highlighting.
Ditto
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Ditto on the factbook and the person place and thing tagging. I would like to see these limited things available offline, although I do recognize that the mobile version won't ever be the workhorse of the pc/mac version. That doesn't seem like the niche mobile is about.
Here is another simple way to help satisfy some of this need however, based on the unique strengths and uses of mobile, if it could be implemented into the desktop or web version:
I created my own custom guide for the desktop version that runs a series of searches on a pretty sophisticated list of resources. I absolutely LOVE my custom guide, but once it has done its work, all I have to do is start wading through READING everything I found. If there were a way to export the contents of the guide on the desktop as a "reader's edition" so that it were essentially a downloadable printout of everything I check off the guide that I want to read, I would then be happy to open that on mobile and start working through it, offline.
This would basically hot-stitch together my dictionaries (only the entries relevant to the guide) and commentaries, church father readings, etc into a binder which I could then work through. Bonus points if I can add notes to the reader and they actually record back to the original resources, as currently I do something like this by exporting to a Word file and assembling it quickly into an epub which I open up on a kindle, but notes are out of the ecosystem of logos and can't be easily added back in. I know I can "print" the guide, but this only shows the short forms and doesn't actually pull the relevant chapters from the resources themselves.
Let me spend 15 minutes in front of my glowing computer in my office, and 4 hours with my mobile edition at the beach; as this tends to be the way I am already using the mobile app. The desktop version is powerful, but the fact is that you don't read long books on a computer as well as on a tablet (e-ink especially).
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I created my own custom guide for the desktop version that runs a series of searches on a pretty sophisticated list of resources. I absolutely LOVE my custom guide, but once it has done its work, all I have to do is start wading through READING everything I found. If there were a way to export the contents of the guide on the desktop as a "reader's edition" so that it were essentially a downloadable printout of everything I check off the guide that I want to read, I would then be happy to open that on mobile and start working through it, offline.
You could get close to this - not exactly as you describe - by using Favorites. Set up a Favorites folder in the desktop app and drag the starting point of the articles you are interested in to it. Do this for all of the articles your guide returns. Favorites get synced to your mobile device and so you could access all the resources by going through the various items in your Favorites folder. What this doesn't do is limit the resource to just the article you are interested in - it would give you the starting points.
I don't want to go into more details here - it would divert the thread too much - but more details on use of Favorites are at https://wiki.logos.com/Favorites. If you want to explore this further please start a new thread in the Logos 8 forum.
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I agree that the highlight function could use some work. Whenever i try to highlight it takes a number of times to get it done. Also, it takes you to a page where you need to select the colour. This takes much valuable time just to highlight text. Perhaps the app could use default highlight colours first then allow the user to change the colour if its needed later on.
The mobile search functions are also very limited, personally i would hope to see more porting of desktop searches to the mobile platform so that the mobile users would be able to benefit more from the app.
I am open to paying a small sum for the mobile app if needed to improve the funcitonality to make it more on par with the desktop version.
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What are some of the primary offline improvements that you'd like to see?
Bring back SD card use..........
On the previous version, I had a lot of my books downloaded to a SD card
and had no problems at all. Around 5 gig worth, this was for a tablet.
If this newer version doesn't allow this, then they have taken a step
back not forward. There may be a time when you can't get internet access
and if you can't download most of your library to a SD card, then you
are out of luck.0 -
My wish list is incredibly simple: continue working with the downloaded books when internet connectivity is lost. I learned something interesting tonight. I've mentioned here a few times that the app doesn't work at all if I'm not connected. Now I realize that is only true for the iOS app. I fired up the Android app on my Chromebook, turned off WiFi, and tried to use the app. It continued working! So, I got out my iPad and tried the same thing there--no dice! Without WiFi, the iOS app became completely unresponsive. I can't imagine this is intentional.
Logos employees, if there's anything you want me to try for you, let me know.
Bob
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Yes 1k times over.
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Have you done a delete and reinstall?
No, I have not, but I will do so. It's certainly easy enough to do, and I should have tried that already.
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I deleted the app and reinstalled it, and it seems to be working with my downloaded resources when I don't have internet connectivity. I'm thrilled that I'm able to use the app when my internet connection is spotty, so this is a big win for me! Is it really that simple? Question for the Logos folks: when I brought up the fact that the app didn't work at all when offline, no one spoke up to say that this is abnormal and not what I should have been seeing. Does that mean that this really is a problem, or did I just have a corrupted installation somehow? Thanks for any light you can shed on this.
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There's a long-standing anomaly in the iOS mobile app - not sure if it's still there in the 8.x series - that manifests with the symptoms you've described.
If you migrate from one device to another and use iOS backup / restore to do that, and/or the built-in migration feature (which uses bluetooth under the covers, I believe), the Logos app will show up on the new device. Within that app, all the resources that had been downloaded on the previous device will still show up as downloaded - even though they aren't actually on the device. So you have to "remove" them (even though they're not there) and then re-download them. I believe the same behavior would be observed if you reset an existing device to default settings and then restore from backup.
When you're offline and trying to use resources that show as downloaded, I see the behavior you've described. So my process in such situations now is to plan for that step when migrating / upgrading to a new device.
FYI...
Donnie
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I hadn't run across that before, but I think that is definitely what happened to me. Thanks Donnie!
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