Kobo | eBooks & Audiobooks
Your digital bookshelf | Browse, read and listen to books and stories
Total ratings
3.84
(Rating count:
287,167)Review summary
These summaries are automatically generated weekly using AI based on recent user reviews.
Google Play Store does not verify user reviews, so some user reviews may be inaccurate,
spammy, or outdated. Pros
- Good text readability and options for font sizes and colors.
- Longstanding users appreciate the recommendations and organization of the library.
- Highlighting features have seen improvements.
Cons
- Frequent crashes and loading issues, especially after recent updates.
- Inability to sync properly across devices, leading to lost content.
- Recent updates have removed useful features like volume button page turning and landscape mode.
- App requires an internet connection to start or function properly, which is inconvenient.
- Dictionary functionality is lacking and sorting options are limited.
Most mentioned
- App crashes and hangs frequently, especially after updates.
- Loss of previous features and functions in recent updates.
- Poor handling of offline reading, refusing to work without internet.
- Syncing issues across devices.
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User reviews
Recent rating average:
1.70
All time rating average:
3.84
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| Date | Author | Rating | Comment |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2024-11-29 |  | | Latest UI really breaks brightness control on Pixel 7. No use of ambient light sensor, and app's own brightness setting is not calibrated for the phone. Only half of the slider is useful. Please change this back to defer to the phone's brightness controls. Update 2024-11-29: it got even more broken. On reopen, brightness gets stickyly reset at some very low level *even after I have explicitly increased it* in the unfortunate new UI introduced in the recent major UX revision. |
| 2024-11-27 |  | | This is by far the worst reader app I've used. Most apps when you download a book (audio or ebook) will load up at least your library and alert you to your being offline and those features being unavailable. Kobo gets stuck on the loading screen. What use is a reader if you can download books but not use them when there's no service? If I could rate this app any lower than 1, I would. Absolutely worthless. |
| 2024-11-25 |  | | Immediately regret my purchases now locked here. Awful app, slowest app on my tablet. Constantly hangs and crashes. Won't let you change your download location to an sd card so I cannot download my purchased books. I thought maybe I could migrate them from the desktop app but guess what, that's more broken than the mobile app. Desktop app won't let you complete the captcha to log in no matter how many times you answer it correctly. Stick to apps like kindle and play books that actually work. |
| 2024-11-21 |  | | I've had this app for years on multiple different devices and have never had issues like I have with the latest update. App freezes at the end of every chapter and needs to be restarted, font size randomly changes when "turning" the page, books are VERY slow to load. They need to get things figured out before they force an update through! 🙄 |
| 2024-11-19 |  | | If you'd have asked me 2 days ago I'd have told you I absolutely love this app, however, it updated yesterday and has been nothing short of a mess since! It lags horribly, I can only read a chapter sometimes 2 and then I have to back completely out of my book and go back on to get to the next chapter, and some of my books have disappeared! It's very frustrating if you're someone who reads quite a bit like I do! Please fix it! |
| 2024-11-03 |  | | This app crashes every 10 seconds. I have tried to delete and reinstall. There are no updates.. I have no idea why it is crashing but it does every few seconds while listening to an audiobook and its the most frustrating experience I have ever had with an audiobook app. |
| 2024-11-03 |  | | The app used to be functional, but now, the app randomly closes out when you open a book or adjust font settings. My books don't sync between my devices anymore. Certain audiobooks just stop producing sound in the middle of chapters. If the app isn't closing itself out, I'm having to constantly restart it to get it to work. I had hoped this would be an alternative to Kindle, but it was short-lived. I've purchased my last audiobook with this app and won't be using it in the future. |
| 2024-11-03 |  | | App cannot be spanned on MS surface duo. Pages used to be blank but there was a work around. Now the app refuses to use columns, so you can't read the text as it's blocked by the gap in the screen. Checking the switch for columns in landscape mode does nothing. Somehow they made an already broken app worse. I'm honestly in awe of how bad this is. They also removed the page curl transition which while not a big deal was a nice feature. KOBO is the worst reading app. Shop elsewhere. |
| 2024-10-31 |  | | If I wrote this review last month, I'd have given it 5 stars. That was before I tried to use it on an airplane. I very carefully downloaded several books, so I could read while in airplane mode. I was NOT expecting the app to completely refuse to start when it couldn't reach the internet. WHY???? I'm just lucky that I turned it off promptly after I got on the plane, so I could reconnect, start the app, and then read. Overall it works well, but this behavior is a deal breaker. |
| 2024-10-24 |  | | This app dropped from 5 stars to 4 after the last 'upgrade.' Since then, the brightness of the app has to be manually changed in-app and no longer configured with my phone's (Google Pixel 4A) brightness auto-setting. Frequently, when I open the app, the book I'm reading does not load until after I hit the Back button, return to my library, and reopen the book. Apart from these issues, it serves my needs. |
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