The abomination that is the ComiXology downgrade

The ComiXology downgrade pushed out has been terrible.

1. Guided View in app no longer allows for full page displays prior to next page or before reading page (a downgrade).

2. You can no longer find comics available from specific vendors (that I’ve been able to figure out) nor is there an option to click into that from an issue from that publisher (another downgrade).

3. There is no comic specific search in the Amazon store now. You can’t search for books, you get random, completely unrelated and irrelevant results (another downgrade).

4. You cannot easily match what issues are contained in a trade (they were directly linked in the old app and even on the site, a HUGE downgrade).

5. When browsing to figure out if you have issues contained in a trade, it now requires you to search through your collection because not only are issues in trades no longer linked, but in the case of everything I have recently browsed, the trades are NOT linked to the series itself. Now, if we go back to the prior critique about search being garbage, do you have any idea now how painful you have made matching a trade to the series it belongs to (as you list it as a separate series, like a series of books because Kindle mentality apparently)?  So not only is it not obvious what issues are linked to a trade, but it’s damn near impossible to search for the series itself to see if already owned or price compare individual issues (more than a HUGE downgrade, now it’s like you’re spitting in our faces).

6. Free books!  Where are they?!  Building on not being able to view publisher content AND garbage comic search, you used to be able to browse through the free sections of all the publishers. Furthermore there were multiple free book sections that were part of the standard interfaces. I for the life of me can’t figure out how to find any of that content now (another downgrade).

7. Book status in listings!!  Being able to see if a book was already purchased in the listing made it a lot easier to scroll past or in free lists, made it obvious what you didn’t have. Now depending on the view you have none of that data until you click into an item listing or at least click on it to see. (Yet another downgrade).

8. None of the above even touches on how utterly broken you’ve made the desktop experience, but you folks knew you broke that and thus far the only thing you’ve copped to, yet we’re just supposed to wait for it to be fixed because you broke it for funsies?!  How is that cool? Why should we keep giving money to sadists?

YET, I as a customer that has invested fairly heavily in your platform am supposed to be impressed with being given the ability to pinch zoom my list view when you’ve destroyed every other feature of the application that made it worthwhile to pay for digital comics?!  Are you kidding me?  As someone apparently said at some point “don’t piss on me and tell me it’s raining.”  This is a downgrade, and very bad for anyone who has used this app. Couple that with other disappointments in the Amazon ecosystem and the unnecessary hike in Prime while also paying for a ComiXology Unlimited and Amazon Music subscription, I think it’s time to clean house. Prime is nearing it’s useful end for value, I’ve moved to a different platform that understands the concept of music list randomization, and ComiXology is now completely and utterly broken. I don’t feel it’s fair to be expected to receive payment for mediocrity at best and an actively hostile user experience at worst (which is what the ComiXology downgrade feels like).

Thanks for showing me how awful things can be. I’ll give things until my next Unlimited renewal, but if we don’t have feature parity at that point I’m not spending another dime on ComiXology and I’ll likely be terminating all my other Amazon subscriptions as well.