When Customer Support Is Stymied

[Dan]

I've been experiencing an odd problem ever since the Kindle app for iPad was updated to 4.8.1. Books are fine, but my magazine pages are fuzzy. So pages of The Atlantic and the New York Review of Books are pixellated and nearly unreadable. I can read the writing in the "text" view, but there are no pictures and that doesn't work with the National Geographic (also fuzzy).

So far I've talked with 3 customer service folks, in addition to sending an email from within the app. I have an iPad Air 2 and the current iOS (8.3), and plenty of space.

But customer support can't figure it out. Eventually they had me delete the app and reinstall it, then re-download the magazines--still fuzzy. It seemed clear that all three support people were working from a script, and the first person I talked with didn't understand the word "fuzzy," wondering if my problem was missing pages. I had to politely end the call and try again the next day.

I think there are a few hints of this happening to others, but I don't know if there is something fundamentally wrong with my own device or whether there is a genuine software issue. I wait with baited breath as I open the App Store (probably once an hour), desperately seeking, well, a Kindle app update.

The iPhone version of the Kindle app seems to be okay, strangely. And books are fine.

The last customer support person I talked with said she would send the information to the 5 affected magazine publishers. Since then--silence.

In a long association with Amazon this is the first time support folks couldn't "make it good." So now I'm waiting for something to happen, and I thought I'd ask whether anyone in the group has experienced the issue? The fuzziness looks like a PDF that hasn't quite resolved itself, only the fuzziness doesn't go away.

One of life's mysteries.

Dan

[Marti]

I didn't think that the magazines came through the kindle app. I have The New Yorker on my Fires but they are independent of my books. Haven't read them on my ipad (2nd gen) in a long time, but they don't come through the kindle app on my ipad.

[Tom]

Dan wrote: "I've been experiencing an odd problem ever since the Kindle app for iPad was updated to 4.8.1. Books are fine, but my magazine pages are fuzzy. So pages of The Atlantic and the New York Review of B..."

Any change with the 4.9.1 update? As it happens, I have a subscription to The Atlantic and an iPad Air 2 as well, but have not seen any problems myself.

When in 'page' view, what happens if you pinch-zoom? Does it redraw cleanly, or does the fuzziness persist?

It could be a hardware issue, but you would probably have to engage Apple to determine if that is the case. Maybe they have some diagnostics they can run.

[Dan]

Hi, Tom,

The update resolved the issue (so to speak). Whew!

In these cases where it's hard to tell whether others are having the problem, it can feel very lonely and CS folks have no answers. The Atlantic was fuzzy for me, but not you. Yet now, with the Kindle app update, all is well for both of us.

Wouldn't it be interesting to know what changed?

Cheerily,

Dan