iOS 5 Crashes & Kills Stanza reader

UPDATE: 12/25/11 Please read the updated entry on this issue: Stanza Reader Updated: Now compatable with iOS5.
—
If you use an iPhone and the Stanza e-book reader app, you may want to consider NOT upgrading to the iOS5.

Why?

According to numerous emerging reports, it is buggy – so much so, that it crashes the app, which in many cases, will not work at all.

Macworld reported Nov 2, 2011 12:20 pm that “Stanza version—3.1 – which was originally developed for both the Mac and iOS platforms by Lexcycle – last updated in February, is barely useable on iPhones, iPod touches, and iPads running the iOS 5 updated released by Apple a month ago. And Amazon, which owns the app, has yet to indicate whether an update is in the works; the company hasn’t responded to repeated requests for comment from Macworld.”

However, that revelation is not necessarily new, because on October 13, 2011 3:30 pm Teleread writer Paul Biba reported in an article entitled “iOS5 kills Stanza!” that blogger Chris Bridges wrote “when I upgraded to iOS5 this morning… [he discovered] …”that Stanza no longer works” and that it “was a known problem among beta-testers.”

In the forum section of the Amazon.com website, under Customer Discussions, Kindle forum there is a thread entitled “The death of Stanza, ebook reader for iOS,” one reader identified that the problems were known as far back as April 2011.

One respondent on the Amazon forum shared a link to the GetSatsifaction.com website – which is the official Stanza support forum – where yet another respondent wrote that “Stanza is currently so crippled on iOS 5 that it is essentially unusable. But if you had ebooks on Stanza on your iOS device that you were not mirroring in a desktop app (like Calibre) but hope to reclaim, you can reclaim them, as long as you haven’t yet deleted Stanza from your iOS device.”

Even on the Apple Computer forums, iPhone and iPad owners are asking if “Stanza, a perfect reader, abel [sic] to read such files as djvu will be upgraded to iOS 5. Or, it will be officially neglected to die by either Apple, or its today owner, Amazon.”

On the Techarp.com website, forum respondent Adrian Wong – noting that Amazon.com had purchased Lexcycle – posted 18th Oct 2011, 12:15 AM that Amazon.com has ceased improvement of “Stanza since 21 February 2011 (for the iOS version). Stanza is apparently using depreciated code that has been removed in iOS 5, causing it to fail,” and suggested that “it looks like Amazon has absolutely no intention on further developing Stanza.”

If you’re one of the many whom have had the bad luck to have installed iOS5, and thereby lost the use of Stanza, your best likely option is to use the i2Reader by Unsanity.com.

Moral of this story?

Don’t always “update” just to be updating. Sometimes, the “update” is a downgrade.

As for me?

I’m still using my jailbroken iPhone 3GS on iOS 3.1.3.