I was a happy Dante user. For those who don’t know it, Dante was a solid Android book tracker. Scan a barcode, look up metadata, track your reading progress. Simple, effective, and most importantly: it worked. Until it didn’t.
Adding books by title or barcode? The search API the app relied on had stopped responding, so neither ISBN lookups nor name searches worked anymore. Backups? Gone too. Dante had gone quiet: No updates in a long time, and the features that depended on external services had stopped working. I get it, though. Focus shifts. I’ve been there myself. I recently handed one of my own projects over to a new maintainer because I couldn’t keep up anymore. But understanding why doesn’t make it any less frustrating when it’s your bookshelf that’s stuck.
And that’s where the real pain started. Getting my own data out of Dante was a nightmare. There was no export function anymore. […]