Apple / book / BOOKBUDDY PRO: BOOK TRACKER
REVIEW
BookBuddy Pro is the personal-library app that refused to die.
Fifteen years in, BookBuddy still beats Goodreads at the one job most readers actually have — keeping track of the books on their own shelves.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 11, 2026 · 4 MIN READ
BookBuddy Pro: Book Tracker
KIMICO, LTD.
OUR SCORE
7.6
APPLE
★ 4.8
PRICE
$9.99
BookBuddy launched in 2010, which means it has outlived three iPhone form factors, two iPad redesigns, and an entire generation of book-tracking startups that thought social feeds were the point. Most of those competitors are gone. BookBuddy is still here, still maintained by the same developer, still mostly doing what it set out to do — keep a private, searchable, accurate record of every book you own and every book you’ve read.
That kind of survival usually means one of two things: the app is a fossil propped up by inertia, or the original idea was right and didn’t need much revision. BookBuddy is closer to the second. The 2010 design instincts are visible in the toolbars and the icon set, but the database underneath is current, the barcode scanner is fast, and the iCloud sync works.
BookBuddy is what happens when a single developer keeps shipping the same idea longer than most of his competitors stay in business. The result isn’t fashionable, but for the specific job of tracking a real personal library, nothing on the App Store does it better.
BookBuddy is what happens when a single developer keeps shipping the same idea longer than most of his competitors stay in business.
FEATURES
Scan a barcode with the camera and BookBuddy pulls cover art, author, ISBN, publisher, page count, and a synopsis from a stack of book databases. Manual entry exists for older or self-published titles the scanner misses. The Pro tier lifts the free version's hard cap and unlocks fields the casual reader will never use — series tracking, custom collections, loan tracking with due dates, condition grades, signed-copy flags, and free-text notes per book.
Reading status splits into wishlist, owned, currently reading, and finished, with a rating field and a date-finished log that drives the year-in-review screens. iCloud sync is the default; Dropbox CSV and HTML export are still there for users who don't trust the cloud. Search runs across every field at once, and filters stack — "owned hardcovers by Le Guin published before 1985" resolves instantly.
The iPad layout earns its keep with a split-view library that feels closer to Delicious Library than to a phone app stretched sideways. Shortcuts integration covers the obvious automations: add this book, mark as read, what am I reading.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The cataloguing is genuinely thorough. Few apps get fifteen years of feature requests and stay coherent — BookBuddy mostly does, because every new field is optional and the default view stays close to what the 2010 version did. A library of two thousand books loads instantly on an iPhone 14, which is not something every database app of this vintage can claim.
Pricing is honest. The free tier handles a modest shelf without nagging, and Pro is a one-time $4.99 in-app purchase rather than the subscription treadmill every younger competitor has switched to. The developer ships small updates several times a year and answers email, which used to be table stakes and is now a differentiator.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
The interface shows its age. Toolbars are crowded, icons are inconsistent in weight, and the settings screen reads like a checklist of every feature added since iOS 7. New users will spend an evening figuring out which fields they actually want before the app stops feeling cluttered.
There is no Mac, Android, or web companion. iCloud sync covers iPhone and iPad and that is the entire universe. The social layer most readers expect from Goodreads — friend feeds, shared shelves, public reviews — is absent by design, and the developer has been clear it isn't coming.
CONCLUSION
Install BookBuddy Pro if you own more books than you can remember and want a private catalogue that survives the next Goodreads outage. Skip it if you mainly read on Kindle and want a feed of what your friends are reading. Watch for whether the developer ever ports the catalogue to the Mac — that's the one missing piece that would make the lock-in worth recommending without caveat.