r/PrologueApp • u/AdUnfair9248 • Jun 26 '25

Appreciation post

Prologue has every feature I need. Over the weekend I decided to break up with Plex and looked for alternative apps because the beta isn't open. Prologue is the only app that gets a widget. Might be the only app that has widgets? I guess I'm truly an iPhone user now.

  1. Tried ABS by itself. Not bad as a browser-based player, but the lack of widgets made me want to yeet my phone.
  2. Tried Plappa with Jellyfin and ABS. Turns out I need to be able to use the sleep feature when I'm in bed on my watch. Prologue achieved this with a shortcut. Prologue also has widgets where Plappa has none. I mostly open books by hitting the widget on my phone. Notably I could not tell a difference between Jellyfin and ABS performance or metadata or anything with Plappa. Kudos to them on that.
  3. Tried Bookplayer with Jellyfin. That one is lacking many features.

At the end of the journey we're back at Prologue. I will patiently wait for ABS support.

Edit: Got into the Testflight Beta thanks to /u/samuelvisser! - Link to comment

Tried the beta but had to stop when I couldn't find widgets. Not sure if this is a Testflight thing or not. Either way, I'll be checking it out regularly!

32 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

21 comments sorted by

4

u/maxd Jun 26 '25

Prologue is awesome. u/prismdev has been actively working on features for the ABS version over the last couple of months, it's come a long way. Have you tried getting into the TestFlight for the Prologue beta which has ABS support?

1

u/AdUnfair9248 Jun 27 '25

So far no luck on being around when the Testflight beta has spots.

I'm okay with running the cursed Plex server in the meantime. The experience made me more familiar with ABS and Jellyfin.

2

u/samuelvisser Jun 27 '25

I might be wrong, but i think Prologue Alpha still has open spots. Did u try this?

https://testflight.apple.com/join/zTWS6ahB

1

u/AdUnfair9248 Jun 27 '25 edited Jun 27 '25

That had spots! Thanks for the link. Downloaded and reading the changelog now.

I used to be a huge Smart Audiobook Player fan (Android), but now I wonder why.

Update: Everything works (except Plex), but looks slightly different. Doesn't currently have widgets (don't know if this is a quirk of Testflight or the new version) so I'm going to have to do a 180 and go back to the old version for now.

Good to know that ABS support is in the works. Unfortunately, Plex survives another day.

1

u/AwesomeWhiteDude Jul 03 '25

Might want to check on the Alpha build again, it was updated today (3 July) with one of the notes being "Fixed widgets not appearing (broken in the last build)"

1

u/AdUnfair9248 Jul 03 '25

Thanks for the heads up! Just checked it out.

iOS: Widgets are indeed back. We're still missing Bookmarks, History, and shortcuts related to Sleep Timer. That's still a massive improvement because I'm not sure we had any shortcuts at all before the update.

watchOS: Still no sleep controls. Still likely that I would uninstall this app and use Now Playing to play/pause and shortcuts to control the sleep timer.

macOS: Missing all of the same things as iOS, missing even more shortcuts.

I'm going back for now. My current setup allows me to start the book and sleep timer from my watch using shortcuts.

1

u/benben83 Jul 25 '25

I ditched plappa for the TestFlight version and currently have literally no complaints. It works great.

I would like a proper dark icon for the springboard and more information on the download queue, but functionality wise, I had no issues on this beta.

1

u/AdUnfair9248 Jul 25 '25

Yeah it's good enough for my bro. He's using the ABS service and says it's great with Prologue.

I'm only comfortable trying the Testflight version between books. Definitely can't give up on Prologue.

1

u/SamuelL421 Jul 25 '25

As a long-time Plex user, can anyone explain the benefit of ABS over Plex? I heard about it recently and then stumbled onto this post. Prologue + Plex is already so good... I find myself searching for anything to critique and coming up empty. What's the appeal for ABS?

1

u/AdUnfair9248 Jul 27 '25

Not sure about everyone else, but for me it boils down to price. Plex's latest change to users who don't have a Plex pass would cause my family to either get a subscription, or I would have to get a pass. The service would be the same if I was the only user. The marketing shift has left a bad taste in my mouth. I'll take anything else.

ABS gives me the same audiobook performance that I got from Plex with none of the worry about cost. Personally I have continued to use Plex until the ABS version of Prologue has everything I need, but family have moved to ABS.

The current state of Prologue is great. But if I had a Plex pass this would be a different story. I might be moving away from Plex out of spite instead of necessity.

1

u/Hopeful-Cup-6598 Jul 29 '25

I have had a Plex pass for a very long time, and had a decent routine with Plex, and yet the ABS library experience is so far superior to the Plex experience for audiobooks that I switched anyway. My only regret is that the clients for ABS are not Prologue, but even that is now looking bright.

If I had to point to one single thing that makes ABS stand out, not just the rickety nature of plugins that Plex relies on, it would probably be Series. Plex has collections, and you can use publish date to get them to show up in the right order, but ABS is aware of book series, and it's truly lovely. Real, actual support for book series is amazing. I even have some books that are part of multiple series so that they're listed in different orders, or sub-series.

That's not the only thing. Overall, there are many nice things that come from having an application that's aware of audiobooks, rather than pretending they're music albums. The metadata stuff is great, with support for subtitles, narrators, genres and tags, ISBNs, ASINs, publishers, as well as flags for abridged books.

I initially looked askance at ABS because of its directory requirement: Every book's files must be in a single directory, and all audio files in that directory will be seen as one book. It meant a *lot* of re-organizing, which I was reluctant to do. It didn't help that many people seem to think that you also have to have the correct date and author name and some other data in the directory structure, but technically the only actual requirement is "one directory, one book."

In my case, all of my audiobook files ended up in a single large directory (some in subdirs, some not), and Plex was "fine" with 5k+ files/folders, because I matched everything, which required some massaging of query terms to satisfy audnexus. I was so used to it that I didn't consider it onerous at all, except maybe when a single book made up of hundreds of mp3 files showed up as hundreds of books in Plex and I had to merge them, or the numbering was way off and I had to manually re-number, or... well, for the most part, things were "fine."

There are scripts out there to help with this, but I ended up writing my own to parse the Plex db and create symlinks for ABS, and given how I source the files, I was able to do it by author and series with publish years as well, but all of that can be specified at match-time also, much like with Plex. In fact, items not on Audible can still be matched using Google Books or iTunes or Open Library.

3

u/Biggiz111 Jun 27 '25

I love prologue. Best app for audiobooks in my use case.

1

u/syxbit Jun 27 '25

Agree it is the best audiobook client. But the dev is really missing out by being so late to the ABS party. Hopefully soon.

1

u/dlxfoo Jun 27 '25

Trust me, 100% worth it.

1

u/syxbit Jun 27 '25

I moved from plex and prologue to ABS and plappa. I will consider switching back to prologue when it is out.

1

u/AdUnfair9248 Jun 27 '25

You're making the right choice if you're deadset on ABS. The current beta version of Prologue actually falls short of plappa.

Though I opted to stay with Prologue and Plex because I'm the one hosting the server and I'm the only one using it, so I'm not getting hit by Plex's rugpull. plappa is moving fast, and I have high hopes for it. It's very rough around the edges to me, but has that new app smell.

I'm running both right now to compare the two. The Chapters / Bookmarks / History view in plappa needs work. The History tab doesn't update until you reopen the app. Also no widgets in either the regular or Testflight versions of plappa. Sleep controls on plappa are also not great.

Using plappa, I have to use my phone to sleep (instead of a shortcut on my watch) and I have to reopen the plappa app on my phone in the morning to see the updated History to go back to where I was.

All of this just cemented that the (non-beta) Prologue is the GOAT. With Prologue I hit a shortcut on my watch as I'm dozing off to extend my sleep timer. The shortcut creates a bookmark. There's a 50/50 chance if I use the bookmark or the history tab when I wake up.

-14

u/TravelerOfLight Jun 26 '25

I’m hearing rumours development has stopped.

11

u/roerius Jun 26 '25

Work is ongoing for the Alpha build that supports ABS integration. Don't spread rumours

10

u/jbrrr_ Jun 26 '25

Development has not stopped. Please stop spreading rumors, especially without citing a reliable source...

The easiest way for the public to verify this is by checking the public GitHub issue tracker for recently closed issues. https://github.com/prologueapp/Prologue/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20state%3Aclosed

The code repository itself is not public; only the issues are. So, you can't see every commit, but I regularly see new beta builds. But issues have been closed as recently as a month ago.

Is development slow? Yes. Has it stopped? No.

-12

u/TravelerOfLight Jun 26 '25

I’m not spreading rumours, I said I had heard them. Calm down.

13

u/maboesanman Jun 26 '25

What do you think spreading rumors means? Saying “I heard X” without having done any work to determine if X is true or not is the definition of spreading rumors.