Obviously our work is going to go into improving the built-in reader, since the entire goal is to provide a seamless reading and annotation experience.

In particular, the phone locks when a pdf in on the screen, this is extremely annoying when reading.

What exactly do you mean by this? What hardware and Android version?

The zoom levels are pretty bad.

Say more?

I second that. While I see the motivation for you to improve the built-in reader, I doubt that this is what the majority of users want (have you actually asked them? I assume everyone has their own favorite PDF reader/annotator app), at least it is not what I need. I am using the Boox Tab X C (Android 13), and here I use the standard Neo Reader app. The current Zotero built-in reader is practically unusable for annotations on this device, since the toolbar vanishes at some point, from which it is no longer possible to annotate at all.

@dstillman With all respect for your hard work, but I disagree with the project leaders' decision to even implement a built-in reader for multiple reasons.

1. A PDF reader is a solved problem. There is nothing novel about it, a multitude of implementations already exist. Yet another implementation is just an exercise in futility and largely wasted time and effort on part of the developers. This effort would be much better spent in integrating existing readers and implementing other features.

2. I see no prospect of this project to significantly improve on any of the existing readers to the point where the built-in one is better than all of the others on all possible devices. This means that a user will almost always use an external reader because it offers better features, even if the built-in one is better integrated. After all, we mainly use Zotero to solve the problem of organizing documents, not organizing annotations. I for my part use hand-written annotations on a boox device, I doubt that you built-in reader will be even usable, much less good enough to replace the boox built-in reader.

3. I doubt that this decision was taken based on user feedback. In my mind, and I could be wrong - still I doubt it, the overwhelming majority of users will want to use an external reader of their choice and which they are already familiar with and which supports their device best, and will hope for a better integration. Alas the developers are focusing their effort on the built-in reader.