Android Download Issue

[omgwtfbbqchicken1337]

My problem is that I am unable to add vocabulary words from the lessons to the word bank. I thought that by downloading the lesson it would allow me to do it but every time I get about 70% done downloading the lesson, I get a download error. Either something is very broken or this is just an extremely unintuitive app, either way, I need help figuring this out.

[team.relationships]

Hello omgwtfbbqchicken1337,

Thank you for posting.
We're sorry for the inconvenience. Our team will contact you as soon as possible.

Sincerely,
Lena
Team JapanesePod101.com

[fzyukio]

Hello omgwtfbbqchicken1337,

Thank you for posting.
We're sorry for the inconvenience. Our team will contact you as soon as possible.

Sincerely,
Lena
Team JapanesePod101.com

Same/similar problem here. Yesterday I was still able to download a few lessons to my Android phones without incident. Today I got this:


All the audio in that lesson are grayed out, with a lock symbol like this:


Tried it on a different phone, got a different message, but anyhow same results:


My subscription is still active until 2018.
Please fix it soon.

[fzyukio]

I found out the reason and how to fix this. If anyone encounters the same problem, this might help:

1. Version 1.12 genuinely has a problem with downloading. So upgrade it to 1.13 first.

2. The bigger problem is that I was connecting to my institution's network, which has a proxy (HTTP), and it had been working fine until recently, they sort of graylisted libsyn.com because of the traffic, so now, connections to libsyn.com require authentication. JapanesePod101.com hosts its podcast files on libsync.com, but the PDFs and the line-by-line transcripts are hosted on japanesepod101.com. That's why the app can download PDF and the line-by-line audio, but not the conversation.

3. My Android devices allow specifying a proxy, but not the authentication, and it seems this proxy is used by the browser only anyway. The Innovative App doesn't care. So when this app tries to download an audio from the server, it got a 403 Forbidden response.

Solution: install an app that can set up system-wide proxy with authentication. I found Drony on Google Play and it's extremely useful. If your device is rooted, you can try ProxyDroid as well. But mine are not rooted, so I use Drony. With a few clicks, the app helps setting up a virtual VPN connection via the proxy, and I can now download my lessons again.