Goodreads: Book Tracker & More

Goodreads Review: The Biggest Book Community, With Ads You Can't Pay Off

What $0 buys: every feature, plus ads with no paid exit

Nothing in the app costs money: neither Google Play nor the App Store lists an in-app purchase, so there is no premium tier and no locked shelf or stat. Advertising pays instead: Play shows a Contains ads badge, Apple's age rating lists Advertising, and the privacy notice says personal information is used for interest-based ads. Play reviews from May to September 2026 describe the load growing: video ads for non-book products, a banner on the My Books page that loads late and pushes the shelves down, and promotional push notifications dressed up as book alerts. The most-upvoted 2026 review, with 132 helpful votes, complains that no option exists to pay the ads away. Giveaways, the main free extra, let members enter draws for print and Kindle copies sponsored by authors and publishers, and many print draws accept US entrants only.

Reading Challenge and the Did Not Finish shelf, still in whole stars

The Reading Challenge starts with a yearly book count, and since mid-2025 rotating limited-time achievements, such as a Summer Challenge, run alongside it. Friends' progress, dropped in early 2025 to loud complaints, is back on the challenge home in both apps and on the web. The Did Not Finish shelf arrived in March 2026: an abandoned book with a read date counts toward your goal, and exclusive custom shelves already named dnf or abandoned were converted automatically. Link an Amazon account and the Kindle app marks books Currently Reading and Read on its own. Ratings, though, are whole stars only, and a help article updated in September 2026 says there are no plans for half stars. Play reviews from 2024 through September 2026 also report yearly totals that miss books and read dates that change by themselves.

Amazon ownership, ad identifiers and a CSV export that stays on desktop

The company behind the app, Goodreads LLC, is an Amazon subsidiary, and its privacy notice says data may be correlated with your Amazon.com account if you have one. Play's Data safety form lists device IDs shared for advertising, approximate location collected for analytics, and optional data types that include contacts and sexual orientation. Apple's label files name, email, user ID and device ID under the developer's own advertising or marketing. Leaving is possible but split across devices. The full data request sits in the app's privacy settings and arrives as a zip of JSON files behind a link that lasts 90 days, while the CSV export of your shelves works only on the desktop site. Facebook sign-in ended in November 2023, and as recently as April 2026 a Play reviewer described being locked out of an account opened that way.