When I installed the app (the other day), no permissions were requested, and by default storage permissions were turned off. (I was able to upload a screenshot to the forum earlier, which the Play Store page mentions permissions are required for, so I assumed it was already on. However, it was off when I checked the app's permissions for the first time.)
With storage permissions off, the app doesn't play any audio. No audio plays in vocab quizzes where I've said yes to play audio automatically, and pressing the speaker button next to words in quizzes, the dictionary, and my dashboard does nothing. No prompt appears asking for storage permissions, it just doesn't play.
Turning on storage permissions for the app in my Android settings seems to have fixed it, but the app itself did not alert me that permissions were required and I had assumed the app's audio was broken until I checked if the app had any permissions turned off.
That is extremely strange - the site does not cache or save any audio to storage (or anything else, for that matter) - so I cannot reason why it would be acting this way. I just confirmed on an Android 11 device that it played without needing that permission (the permission had been denied).
I noticed you have another issue on the same ereader - I have to wonder if it is somehow related to how Android was changed to support that ereader.
Do you have any other devices to test on to see if the issue repeats itself?
Yeah I did think it was odd for that permission to affect the audio. I fiddled around more with turning the permission on and off and now I'm not sure if it's related; sometimes the audio plays without the permission and sometimes it doesn't. But the permission was the only thing that changed between the audio initially being broken and working.
I also just tested with my phone (Samsung Galaxy A5, Android 8) and it was able to play audio without the permission.
The issue was that the app wasn't playing any audio after I installed it, and it started working after I changed the permission setting, so I assumed that was it. It now seems to play audio mostly consistently, but sometimes lapses. I'm not sure there are any other variables at play besides my ereader's weird OS... is there anything else I can do to test what situations the audio won't play?
I'm not sure of what could be tested aside from that, to be honest - the whole situation is really mysterious to me. I'll keep thinking on it, but without a device like that to test it, it's going to be difficult to test it. :(