It’s a keeper – Bound - Audiobook Player Review

First impressions: Totally worth the $3.99, smooth transition from Audible, better than other audiobook apps I’ve tried. After making the move from Android to iPhone I missed my feature rich and easy to use audiobook app. No one app seemed to have all of the features I was after. Especially for audiobooks I already owned and could transfer to my phone through iBooks. Audible and iBooks together had features I wanted (bookmarking, retain metadata, play a folder of files as a single book, easy to use/understand UI) but neither had all of them. Which is a shame because I thought having one app to play my purchased and downloaded books would be awesome. I was using Go-Player for streaming files from Google Drive but the process of adding files was time consuming. Most recently I gave Bookmobile a try and while it had the functions I wanted, the UI was… let’s say clunky. I was a little hesitant of Bound because I read a review from a few weeks ago (end of Feb 2020, currently April 2020) that said there was a 60-day trial. I didn’t see that in the App Store. Once I bought the app though I really enjoyed the similar layout to Audible. I didn’t love having to download files from the cloud since I had just copied a bunch of books onto my phone, but that’s an easy fix. Accessing and playing files is a breeze and fixing metadata on the fly is a nice touch. I did find that downloading files while my VPN was on caused many downloads to fail. This stopped when I turned the VPN off. I have two feature suggestions that maybe are not necessary but I enjoyed from Android. 1. Bookmark/save Google Drive folder for adding more books in the future instead of starting from the top level of Drive every time I want to download a file. 2. Allow a folder structure to group certain books together. I’m not sure this would work in the current UI but I do remember having the option to see, for example, “Star Wars Books” as a folder rather than seeing every one of these books mixed in with other titles.
Review by S. Seigel on Bound - Audiobook Player.