Audible for Android Review

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As an avowed audiobook fan (driving in the car with an audiobook is a great past-time of mine) I was pretty excited about the whole Audible craze: a monthly subscriptions for audiobooks sounded great to me!

That said, Audible for Android is an app that you won’t want to pass up if you’re an audiobook fan. The Audible app is a great tool for anyone looking to get into listening to audiobooks on your Android; it’s functional, neat, and has a UI that’s not as unintelligible as some other apps I’ve used. In fact, the UI is really what first struck me when I used the app (as I suppose UIs are wont to do): it’s very clean and well-built for its purpose. It doesn’t try to saddle you with tons of different bells and whistles that you won’t need: you can view your library, info about your audiobooks (duration, publisher, author, etc.), get news about Audible, and change some settings and view some stats about your use of the app. That sort of simplicity might not appeal to some users, but it’s clean and a mark of good design.

One feature that I did find enormously useful was the button-free control system the app uses. You can use the touchscreen to skip forward, backward, etc. and so forth, navigating through the audiobook without actually having to look at the screen. This is fantastic for many audiobook users, since many of us use our audiobooks in the car, while sleeping (or lazing on the beach), and other places where having to look at the screen would be inconvenient.

There is not much to say about this app that’s not good; it’s an interface to the Audible system and it’s a great audiobook player in its own right; the only complaint about the app is that the volume can be slightly quiet on some hardware.

In conclusion, even for those of you not already Audible subscribers, this app might be the ticket for your entry into the audiobook world on Android; I would encourage you to download the app and take it for a test drive; it’s a solidly built audiobook player that may pull you into a world of book on tape (book on smartphone, perhaps?) even if you weren’t an adherent before!