The problem with this, in Panels, is making the assumption the user will always open the comic from the feed.
In Panels, when you start reading a comic, the reading now section shows the comic without the context of the feed it was opened from. In that case, we wouldn’t be able to provide the “next/previous” item.
This leads us to a feature that sometimes works, and sometimes not, depending on where you opened the comic from. This is very hard to communicate to less savvy users.
Inferring the next item from the feed is a hack. It might work on many cases, and it will certainly work in all the cases if the user always open the comic from the correct feed.
But OPDS feeds are completely unstructured and technically ephemeral. They don’t guarantee structure or organization. You could open the comic from a reading list that doesn’t even exist the next time you try to open the comic. Or dynamic feeds like “Added in the last week”, where a title could appear and after some time disappear.
We stand by our previous decision, because we anticipate that hacking that feature would bring way more confused users, reports, and bad reviews, than what “OPDS does not support this” bring. I hope that makes sense.
Fortunately, I’ve been discussing this a lot with Hadrien Gardeur (OPDS creator), and I’m glad to let you know that “continue reading” on OPDS is in the works.
Yes, it will require servers to adopt it, and that will take time. We know. But it will be the correct solution that will work 100% of the times, regardless of where you opened the comic from.
I understand the frustration, but we prefer to write a solid solution, than a hack that will certainly come with more support load for us. I hope you folks understand.