9 days later

@WEBNOVEL_OFFICIAL
I really don’t understand at all why Landscape Orientation Mode was removed from this version, and the last, because so many people prefer to read by orienting their device that way, including and especially me. When you took away Landscape Orientation Mode, you half ruined reading novels for me. Just as many prefer to read with their device in an upright orientation because it’s the closest to reading an actual book, and can’t read any other way, there are an equivalent amount of is that can’t comfortably read without Landscape. As professionals, wouldn’t you want to cater to both types? Why even remove Landscape in the first place? There was simply no logical reason to. I’ve even been asking for more than six months now to add it to comics to so I could read Versatile Mage that way. Landscape Orientation helps comics’ pictures and texts to appear larger and crisper so that there is no need for zooming in when the text is too small to read on a handheld device. It’s the only way to read manga, manhwa, and manhua.
I’ll continue to check in daily and read Versatile Mage here, but until you bring back Landscape mode, I’m not going to be reading any new novels here.

8 days later

I’m getting to the point that my sight is not good enough to read in portrait mode.
For me to read form my cell, I need to increase font size and thus I can only have a few words per line. Really annoying!
Not able to display in landscape is either a bug or a feature. Get rid of it please!

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By the way, this isn’t just an android issue. I’m on iOS.

    CKtalon But why!? Why, why, why? Are they never going to reimplement it? It’s driving me bonkers.

        23 days later

        Well, just have to reading the website for now,. Hope it comes back even though before it was already a pain compared to your average website...

          Well, just have to read using the website for now. Hope it comes back even though before it was already a pain compared to your average website...

          I'm definitely all for giving users more choice about how to hold their device while experiencing the app, but having said that, I'm a developer myself, so I do understand that enabling landscape mode does bring a maintenance cost with it, as all the views which were designed and built for one screen size would then have to accommodate for two.

          App views generally already need to be implemented in several viewports. Think several sizes of smartphones, Samsung Galaxy S9 has a different screen size than Samsung Galaxy S9+, etc. And then you have the tablets, etc. Adding the landscape mode for each of these viewports really multiplies the testing matrix and potentially slows them down when implementing new features.

          So I do understand that landscape mode is lower priority for them.

            I don’t understand why the Landscape feature is missing when all major reading apps like Kindle, Wattpad, Nook, Overdrive, Google Play have it natively. Even smaller ones like Bluefire or comic readers handle it with ease just by flipping the device.

            With income from SS sales and high premium price (more expensive than a subscription to Netflix and Kindle Unlimited combined!), I hope they can reinvest that money back into development for a feature that should have been there from Day 1.

              Cantiara What you say might make sense if they hadn’t already made a Landscape Mode for this app. But they did. Landscape Orientation Mode had long been implemented on this app, then they suddenly took it away during an update. Why? So what if there’s a bit extra maintenance. It can’t be that much considering I haven’t seen that many people complaining about Landscape braking down, only that it’s missing.

                  Modoki It was there from day one, they simply robbed us of it a few months ago and haven’t even given us two words on why.

                      Thousand_Sunny

                      Maybe, as I said before, because it had slowed them down everytime they had wanted to implement new features. If they had kept the landscape mode, they would have had to always take it into account everytime they were building something new in the UI.

                      I'm also assuming they have other stuff in their backlog that are far important to implement in order to increase their business value, and they don't want unnecessary things to impede the time to market of those new stuff. For example, the recent implementation of the Privilege page, the reading list as well as the overal new look of the app. If they still had the landscape mode, they would have to think about how to implement those in more viewports.

                      And maybe their backlog for future plans includes better search/filter functions, some missing functionalities on inkstone that would make things easier for their authors, better algorithm to support a better review system, etc, etc (Disclaimer, these were just some examples, I'm not a WN staff, so I have no actual clue how their backlog looks like). And of course, in addition to that, there's also bugs fixing.

                      So probably that's why they decided to disable the landscape mode because it would just slow them down. It would not only cost them more time in designing the different viewports, but as I said in my previous post, it would also multiply the testing matrix, and mind you, I'm not only talking about the testing of the new functionality, but they also have to make sure the existing functionalities wouldn't regress (maintenance).

                      Again, this was just my assumption and all I said was that I could understand why they had to put the landscape mode in the back burner if my assumption was true.

                      Having said that, as I said before, I'm pro landscape mode, because I do believe users should be able to choose how they would like to hold their device while using the app.

                      And I do understand your frustration, it would be nice if they could explain why they decided to remove it.

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