News: Android

The most notable enhancement of this release is the monochrome launcher icon for modern Androids.

The improvements include

• better language detection (important for hyphenations);
• updated fullscreen mode for phones in a horizontal orientation;
• fixed continuous scrolling on some old devices.

Minor update for the 3.5 series improves the decoration of windows and dialogues. The release unifies the main UI elements style and adds more options in the “Appearance” preferences section.

The update fixes issues and regressions found in the 3.5 release. We will stop the gradual rolling out and release 3.5.x to all users by the end of the week. In this version:

• Better fullscreen appearance on Android 9 devices
• Redesigned “Page turning & text scrolling” preferences section, including
  • Customisable tap zones
  • Vertical page turning option
• Fixed possible crash in the voice selection
• Fixed book encoding issues; changing encoding in the book info dialogue works again
• Fixed opening book from download notification

Today, we announce the most significant update of FBReader for Android in 2023. FBReader 3.5 RC 1 is out. RC is short for “Release Candidate”. If no critical issues are found in the next few days, it will be renamed 3.5. As for today, the app is available to download from our site. We will gradually release it to the Play Store and AppGallery users in the coming days.

It is not 3.2 but 3.5, as it includes too many new features. Almost all essential changes from the beta are included in this release.

• The new text view includes
  • Vertical (continuous) text scrolling
  • Colours support
  • Rendering of all Unicode characters
  • Tweaks for e-ink devices
• The app looks better on newer devices and newer OS versions, including Android 14
• The thumbnail library view (a.k.a. the bookshelf plugin) is built-in in both Premium and Free editions; you can switch back to the “classic” view if you prefer
• The cloud sync is faster and more stable
• The app notifications are split into several channels; you can turn the channels off or on separately
• The app opening of password-protected PDFs
• The release includes a lot of fixes and performance improvements

3.5.* series will work on Android 5.0 and newer.

We updated the plugins accordingly. Since this version, we have changed the plugin numbering scheme to avoid confusion. The plugin has the same number as the main app it is built for.

The weekly update mainly focuses on the interaction with the format plugins. We changed the protocol and fixed the lost position issue in the plugins.

To avoid confusion with the versions, we changed the plugin version numbering scheme. From now on, the plugin will have the same version number as the main app. The plugins 4.0 beta 54 are available to download from our site.

The update also fixes a few minor UI issues.