Mangamo is a manga subscription service that began in beta in Canada, but yesterday it finally was made available globally. Justin and Krystallina gave the app a look, and share their initial thoughts below.
TheOASG’s Coverage of Mangamo
[Part 1 | Please Save My Money Column | Part 2 | Part 3 ]
Justin: The start for Mangamo was pretty rough. Seems that usually happens when new things launch for the first time, and Mangamo’s no different. Yesterday if you subscribed you still couldn’t read it. The UI for subscribing on the phone was off, but maybe it looked better on the iPad. Either way, I gave up and chose to let the service settle in before digging into it. So of course today I jump in, use my iPad, and everything functionally works!
From a launch standpoint, Mangamo does have a large amount of titles. The only issue is because it lists just the title and not also the creator I can imagine someone would be shocked to find out a Shōji Satō work is on the service. There’s probably a number of other creators hidden this way. Unlike MANGA Plus or even Crunchyroll (Though from memory that section’s broken), it doesn’t list the localizers anywhere. A shame, since in checking out a couple manga they look stellar. The summaries might need some work though.
The app itself is simple, so you open it up and you’ll see a bunch of works available. The search function needs some work. There’s no way to type a series in, no A-Z section, and you have redundant tags (cute = kawaii!). How the service keeps track of any manga you read is much appreciated. Probably the challenge this app faces now is everything loading slowly. You’ll read Kitty Diaries where pages pop up fast, and then check out Attack on Titan and see a black screen for 10-15 seconds. That might be generous!
All in all, the best thing Mangamo has done is worldwide availability and starting off as a free trial. The $4.99 price a month seems reasonable. After it fixes the issues plaguing the app, it’ll be all about making it available to more devices (they did confirm an Android version is in the works). Then after that it’ll be how often they update — they might have to post a schedule for it. And it might help to also have tags regarding publishers (you have Kodansha, North Stars Pictures, etc) as well.
Krystallina: COVID-19 has caused a lot of delays. But in Mangamo’s case, did it cause its release to be bumped up? Because the service might be better off if it was being billed as a beta version versus a full app.
Reading it on my iPad, it’s slow, prone to crashes, and navigating it is too often a chore. And manga might have already been removed in the course of a single day! If it’s still there, it should be eligible to be a hide-and-seek champion.
While I’m dunking a lot on the platform — rightfully so, since it’s going to be a paid subscription — it does address one of the big issues I’ve had with various manga-reading apps and services: it covers several genres and demographics. Too often services concentrate on one genre or demographic (shounen, boys’ love, etc.), but Mangamo features an actual selection as if you went to a library.
Image quality is also really good…but that’s only if you manage to suffer through the long loading times, often in the double digits. I’m incredibly concerned that an Android version will be even worse, as the number of devices vastly outnumbers the different iPhone/iPod/iPad models. Mangamo is going to have to address the stability issues ASAP if they want to wean people off of scanlation sites.