Black Library: The App

First off, the good. It is a perfectly serviceable reader. It also syncs your old purchases from the BL site. It’s also a perfectly fine storefront and audiobook player. No gripes there. Let me tell you what my gripes are, I have 3, each one knocks a star off of the rating. 1. The purchase sync does not go the other way. Things you buy on this app you cannot then access on the web-front. I get it on this gripe, I don’t expect this to change as GW said this was the direction they wanted to go. 2. The app is a brick if you don’t have network. I’m in the military, and I recently bought The End and the Death trilogy audiobook to listen to while on a trip, but we didn’t have network for much of it, and whenever we didn’t the app wouldn’t let me access my downloaded library. Which might have been fine if not for gripe 3. 3. The audio and ebooks “downloaded” weren’t actually. Well I mean they were but not as an ePub, pdf or an MP3, they are buried somewhere in the app’s api and you can’t extract them without a 3rd party tool which is definitely against the TOS. In short, without network I had no way to access my purchase. Currently, cannot recommend, buy the books, from a used book store or an FLGS.

So, I understand the impetus behind this app. Piracy concerns aside, the Black Library website is kind of a mess. Unfortunately, this feels half finished. Like, Games Workshop set a deadline for when it was going to debut before it was finished, instead of ensuring it was ready for release before setting a date. I’d say my biggest issue is that it’s a disorganized mess with almost no categorization beyond the basic setting, but that would be incorrect. My biggest issue is actually that I can’t access my already existing Black Library purchases yet. I really, really hope GW changes their plans to shut down access to the website in a couple of months until this app is where it needs to be.

So far, I’ve had a decent experience when using this app. I have not experienced some of the issues other reviewers have, such as the app losing my place in a book. One odd behavior I have noticed, however, is that when I receive a phone call while listening, audiobooks do not automatically resume playing. I would love to see two additions: 1. A CarPlay app! Please, please, please, GW… I beg of you, please add CarPlay functionality to this app. I frequently listen to audiobooks while driving and it would be fantastic to have a way to browse my library from my infotainment system, as well as more granular playback controls. 2. Better organization of the store. It would be great if we were given more filtering options in the store. If I want to read books in the Horus Heresy series about a specific army or character, it would be nice to have filtering options available for this. Bonus request: it would be nice to see an option to list books in a series in chronological order, particularly the Horus Heresy series.