The iBooks one situation is the worst for me. Underneaths it’s actually a really good epub reader with the infinite scroll set up. Perfect for one hand reading.
The front page got so annoying with all these trashy books that I eventually had to DNS blocking some iTunes/Apple endpoints. And now it just displays my current reading books, the previous titles and the daily goal every time I open iBooks.
One huge downside of iBooks is that it would happily deauthorize access to the (DRM free) epub files you’ve added to the app manually after a couple of days without internet connection. I made a mistake of going on a long distance hiking trip and thinking can read some books in the tent before falling asleep. Nope, eBooks refused me until I returned to the mobile coverage area and resynced my library with their cloud service. I switched to an offline-first 3rd party app immediately after.
Here are the two I have for iBooks. I’m using NextDNS so it will still get blocked when I’m outside the house. I only read my local epubs so I don’t know if blocking these will affect anything you bought on the store.
The front page got so annoying with all these trashy books that I eventually had to DNS blocking some iTunes/Apple endpoints. And now it just displays my current reading books, the previous titles and the daily goal every time I open iBooks.