Another legal manga service has launched, so it’s time to investigate!
TheOASG’s Coverage of Mangamo
[Part 1 | Please Save My Money Column | Part 2 | Part 3 ]
Mangamo is backed by a Tokyo-based company who, according to Anime News Network, is made up of “executives from Hulu, Crunchyroll, Netflix, VIZ and other companies”. Buddy Marini, a former CEO of Hulu Japan, is the founder and CEO according to Forbes. Long-time manga readers may also recognize Dallas Middaugh, who has been a part of or lead several publishers like VIZ, Seven Seas, and Del Rey.
The service is going to add new chapters every day for readers to peruse without any limits or ads. Mangamo aims to have over 300 titles within the next three months. Mangamo has agreements with 11 publishers like Kodansha Comics and North Stars Pictures, and titles are chosen by an editorial team. The service costs $4.99 a month with a current 60-day trial, but it is currently only available on the Apple App Store. An Android version is planned for the future. The iOS iPhone and iPad apps are available worldwide except in Japan, China, and Korea.
First time I started it up, it downloaded to my iPad fast. That was good. Unfortunately, a lot of good it did when I opened it up and just got stuck on a loading screen. I know a lot of times when we say “I waited a minute” when we’re using technology we don’t actually mean a minute, but it sure feels like it. This time, though, I actually did wait over a minute. I watched the clock wanted to make sure I wasn’t exaggerating. Going to home screen didn’t do anything; I had to force close it. Even then, while the second time I opened I got past the M circle, it still was rather slow.
I have an iPad Air 3rd Generation, so it’s not old tech by any circumstances, but it was a good 15 seconds for this screen to appear. First was the “New Today!” marks and the names of the two titles on a black screen, then the Attack on Titan image appeared (which honestly freaked me out since I wasn’t expecting it — especially after a near-solidly black screen), and then after that the Fire Force and Battle Angel Alita Mars Chronicle images loaded.
The main screen is honestly not good in my opinion. Waaaay too big images for series there that make browsing at what’s new take too long. The reason for the Titan appearing is because it was new Attack on Titan chapter day — but that notice was below the picture. As you scroll down, Mangamo shows more recent updates and genre recommendations, but some of them seriously nearly take up the entire 10.5″ screen. It’s a downgrade compared to the easy at-a-glance appeal of MANGA Plus. Honestly, the Explore section the equivalent of a virtual billboard since it just feels huge.
Out of curiosity, I tried Mangamo on an iPad Mini 5th Gen as well. This time, I didn’t get stuck, but I did time it, and it was 15 seconds to get the three images to load. Perhaps this is because it loaded some of the other panels first, but that would be more evidence that smaller boxes would be better. What’s the point of having the first thing you see load the last? Either way, only having 2-3 manga highlighted at a time seems rather low on tablets. It probably makes more sense on iPhones, but even phones are getting bigger.
The app did not seem to rotate, and that’s always a disappoint for me. Sometimes I like to use my case’s stand to keep it in landscape mode or have it upside down while I’m charging it. Also, there is no offline reading.
Anyway, on to the Browse section. I guess manga is going to be organized by last update date? There doesn’t seem to be a way to sort by title name in alphabetical order, which would seem to be an obvious method of going through titles. Touching the menu button in the upper-left corner brings up a list of genres. Many are typical like isekai, sports, and romance, but there are also categories like 12+, kawaii, and friendship. So besides the usual genres, you can also sort by themes and such. While most manga services put heavy focus on one genre or demographic, it looks like Mangamo is going to have a variety of shounen, shoujo, BL, GL, and more. That’s a significant step up from some of its competitors.
Currently, I counted about 130 different manga. Some are major titles like the aforementioned Attack on Titan or recent anime blockbuster Somali and the Forest Spirit, but by far these are new or lesser-known manga. Most of the associated art with each series were a black-and-white image, and on a solid black background, it’s not really eye-catching. It’s not like there’s no color artwork with these series, as when you click on a title, there’s a header and featured art in color! More color, less black, please. Yellow buttons stand out, but I’ve already nicknamed this app the Bumblebee service.
Slow and annoying like a bumblebee too… Loading, loading, and lots of loading. Maybe that means their servers weren’t prepared for such a load with a lot of people having downtime because of the COVID-19 pandemic, but honestly, I think it’s the app. I’ve tried several manga apps just after they’ve launched, and it wasn’t this slow. Clicking on things, trying to go back…painful. (I know, #firstworldproblems.) Maybe they need to do some minor behind-the-scenes optimization like scaling down the image sizes, but it’s something that’s going to affect them as a paid service. I’m especially worried because the Android version is going to have to work on a heck of a lot more devices than the Apple family of hardware, and plus Android users outnumber iOS users, especially on phones.
The My Manga section is the most detailed, with sections for All, Reading, Added, and Completed. Which is needed quite frankly since there’s no way to alphabetize manga titles or even search for them! Why is there no search?! That should be a basic requirement for almost any website or service! Especially with so many newly licensed manga.
Attack on Titan currently has 128 chapters. The first four are on Mangamo, so it could be quite a while for readers to catch up to even what Crunchyroll has available (currently Chapter 115+). Will it be updated weekly? Twice weekly? I also hope that since Mangamo is a paid service, chapters won’t be removed a la Crunchyroll. And for other manga, will there be any simulpubs? Or is that a future goal?
Anyway, I signed up for a free trial, and after two or three times of getting stuck on a loading screen after selecting a title, going back and finding myself in a different spot on the Browse list, I finally started reading Loving Yamada at Lv999.
Mangamo offers several reading options. Users can go through pages horizontally or vertically, and you can zoom either by double tapping, long pressing, or pinching. There’s a page view so you can jump to the page you want. Tapping a page shrinks it to make room for menu options. I’m used to reading manga on the Kindle app and ComiXology, and both of these allow me to tap once in the middle of either side of the screen to go back and forth. So I kept trying to do this on Mangamo and bringing up the menu. I do this on MANGA Plus too, but that app doesn’t shrink the page and instead features up a less-intrusive menu (and no reduced image size) versus Mangamo.
As I mentioned before, Mangamo doesn’t rotate with the iPad, so you can’t see two pages at once, and there doesn’t seem to be a two-page option.
Based upon my experience, pages seem to load randomly. Pages you haven’t seen seem to be in low quality and dark. I imagine so you can go back and find where you left off without being spoiled, which is a very nice touch.
I wanted to test if I go back, but again, I got stuck on loading screens. After force closing the app, it did remember I was on Loving Yamada at Lv999 with a little banner at the bottom, and clicking it took me back. So then I picked Fire Fire Fire Black Sword randomly to start just to see, and sure enough, hitting “continue” jumped me right back to where I was. That’s super important with Mangamo’s lag. Get used to this screen — or, even better, a completely black screen!
I even tried the next day, and while it was slightly faster when I tested it (around noon versus about 6 PM), but it was still pushing 5, 10, sometimes 15 seconds. That may seem pretty short, but any web designer knows that you only have a few seconds to grab a user’s attention. Google found in 2016 over half of mobile users abandoned sites that took more than three seconds to load. Kissmetrics says nearly half expect to load a site in under two seconds.
Yes, we’re talking about an image-heavy app here versus a webpage. But, for example, I clicked on Horror at Doll’s Village, and then I had a completely black screen for nine whole seconds. In those types of cases, people are going to be confused. Did it crash? Is it loading? Is my iPad frozen? Even five seconds of a solid black screen is not a good look.
Once all the pages load though, flipping through pages is smooth.
The actual page quality seems quite high. Here’s a comparison of the first page of Attack on Titan on Mangamo (left) versus Crunchyroll (right):
The Mangamo version has more impact since the page fills up the whole screen instead of that reader-inside-an-app approach with black space on the edge. I tried several different manga, and they all looked really good. These manga do seem to be from recent years, so all of these would would have digital versions versus older manga, but I really enjoyed how pages took up the full screen.
According to a commenter on Anime News Network, at least two titles have different translations than their currently-distributed digital versions. So I checked out one of the mentioned titles, Arte. Mangamo on the left, MyAnimeList’s version on right.
The Forbes article says, “Best of all are the translations, overseen by editorial director Dallas Middaugh and a team of professional translators – a big step forward compared to the haphazard and often incoherent efforts of the pirate sites.” Of course, Arte wasn’t a fan translation though. So it could be because of different licensing agreements (particularly since MyAnimeList’s appears to be the magazine version versus the book version), or maybe the current English version didn’t meet Mangamo’s standard. From my light browsing experience, (which was pretty random), I did notice a typo in the summary of Eternity of Creation (“was afine artist”), but everything else seemed fine.
Strangely enough, my adventures led me to a manga that was called something like I Wanna Be Your Girl. Then, the next day, when I was playing around in Mangamo again, the series was listed in my Browse section, but now had (Delete) after the title. Clicking on it got me a “series unavailable” message. I thought maybe they had listed it twice, but I couldn’t find it again. Then after that, I got a “coming soon” message? And then later, a blank screen? What the heck? It had six chapters yesterday, and it’s either gone or really hidden.
And hidden it may be. While yesterday the Browse section had 130 manga in the list, now it only shows about 30. Clicking on a genre(s) brings up manga not found in the Browse list. I don’t think the 30 manga currently shown are the daily updates since the main pages still shows the same as yesterday, but who knows. I honestly don’t. I know according to my current testing, there’s only one isekai, no kawaii, and who knows what else. But are manga like Wanna Be Your Girl disappearing? Are they doing some updates since, as of this writing, the app has only a 2.1 star rating on the App Store, the majority being 1 star? Two stars is the max I’d give Mangamo right now.
It’s disappointing, as Mangamo has high quality versions of manga and is a service that I think will appeal to a wide range of audiences. But it has to work on all its stability issues. Slow loading and crashes were far too common, and it seemed like Mangamo was a beta version rather than a full release. I’m not saying the app needs to be full of pizzazz, but no search or A-Z sorting in 2020 is pretty unbelievable on any media app. Perhaps its debut was sped up in hopes that people would get addicted during the big social distancing push, but I honestly felt discouraged most of the time I was using the app. That’s a shame since there were titles I would be very interested in, but they were too hard to find, let alone read!