At the very tail end of August, Voice Dream Reader, the wildly popular book reading app, launched on Android. This opens up a huge potential market, ranging from students who want to read college coursework on-the-go, to professionals who drive a lot and need an easy way of reading materials with high-quality voices. Because of the excellent price range of Android devices, you can now own a book reader for under $100.
We’ve interview Winston Chen who developed the iOS application, which has now grown into a comprehensive app. Getting this to work on Android from scratch was a unique challenge, as it requires a great effort and collaboration between features and platforms. Michael Scott developed the Android version of Voice Dream Reader, and it has many of the same functionality as found on iOS: Bookmarks, various high quality voices from Acapela (at the moment, Ivona is expected in a future update), along with bookmarking support, DRM-free Epubs, bookshelf views, Bookshare, Dropbox,One drive integration, visual adjustment of the document’s contents, highlighting, built-in web browser…
Just what does it take to develop an Android app anyway? How difficult was it to have all of these features migrate over from the iOS world? What are some future plans for the app? Ultimately, what goals might the team have in mind for its purpose? We sit down with both Michael and Winston to talk about the development and story of Voice Dream reader.