My long relationship with the Kindle iOS app is officially over. A recent update brutally messed up the hyphenation in foreign sideloaded books, making them hard to read. Google Play Books saved my sanity.
I have been reading books on my iPhone since 2009. I tried many different reading apps during this time, but Kindle was always my absolute number one choice. We got along fine for seventeen years, but every good thing must end. Especially when a massive corporation decides to change things that worked perfectly fine for years.
Do they even test these updates on actual human beings?
If you read books in Polish (and other foreign languages) downloaded from local ebookstores, Amazon does not really love you. It is obvious they want to discourage people who do not buy directly from their ecosystem. For instance, if you sideload your books, your notes and highlights simply do not show up on the web interface. It is annoying, yes. But I stayed anyway. Want to know why?
It was all because of hyphenation. The Kindle app always forced hyphenation on my sideloaded books, while other apps failed to do this. For a small iPhone screen, this is literally the single most important factor. Without hyphenation, the text looks terribly ugly. The gaps between words are huge, and reading becomes a painful experience. I tolerated all other Amazon absurdities just to have nicely formatted text.
Then came the end of May. It was probably the 7.59 Kindle iOS app update on May 20, 2026. I opened my book one morning and got a shock. Suddenly, the text was brutally spread across the screen, looking like a total mess. Amazon decided to force the Kindle iPhone app not to hyphenate foreign language text anymore. Why on earth would anyone think this is a good idea?
I spent hours looking for answers and trying to fix it. I opened Calibre ebook management app, tweaked the language declarations, and added custom CSS rules to the epub file. Then I tested this new ebook on both Kindle and Google Play.
The result? Google Play hyphenates the text beautifully. Kindle completely ignores it. See the result below – Kindle is on the left, Google Play Books is on the right.
So that is it. I moved my library to Google Play, and I am happy now. It turns out there is life outside the Amazon ecosystem, and it actually looks much better. Have you also noticed your reading apps getting worse after updates?
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