Crunchyroll’s New Manga App Is Out Now: So, How Is It?

That said, there were also definitely a few messy visual elements, like how the app doesn’t distinguish between volumes and chapters for the most part, meaning something could be listed as having 14 chapters in an outer menu before you click into it and find that it actually means 14 volumes. Some of the filtering options also don’t seem to work, like how if you try to search by works that are “Complete,” the results will come up empty. Additionally, when you try to sift through the whole catalog in the Browse tab, the thumbnails are way too big, making it take much longer to scroll through here than it needs to. Still, while that admittedly sounds like a long list of problems, the reality is that when it comes to the thing you’ll be doing 99% of the time, actually reading manga, it does the job well.

And perhaps most importantly, there’s the actual content on the service. As previously mentioned, it features over 200 series, many of which people will probably actually want to read. From VIZ, you have several of the big battle shounen series, like One Piece, Jujutsu Kaisen, My Hero Academia, Naruto, and Bleach, alongside other favorites from the publisher like Spy x Family and Haikyu!!. There are also several excellent series from Yen Press and Square Enix, like The Apothecary Diaries, Delicious in Dungeon, and The Summer Hikaru Died. One of the most welcome inclusions is the relatively large number of LGBTQ+ manga, like The Guy She Was Interested in Wasn’t a Guy at All (aka Green Yuri), Sasaki and Miyano, She Loves to Cook, and She Loves to Eat, and quite a few more. Overall, it has a decent range, and while it’s certainly much more focused on recently released or ongoing series (especially ones that have anime adaptation streaming on Crunchyroll), it has some action hits, romance stories, fantasy yarns, and more.

However, as previously alluded to, there’s one massive problem: most of the series included don’t appear to have all of the released chapters. As far as I saw, none of the big Viz series had their full back catalogs (Jujutsu Kaisen has 135 chapters out of 275, One Piece has 491 out of 1128, Haikyu!! has 199 out of 402), and things fared only a bit better for many of the highest-profile Yen Press and Square Enix releases. It honestly stood out more when a series did have everything (Delicious in Dungeons and Sasaki and Miyano were two examples) than when it didn’t. It should be clarified that the beginning chapters are always included, and it has all the chapters in sequence up until a certain point—this is worth calling out because this isn’t always the case with these apps, and it’s common for the back catalogs to be harder to access (i.e., they cost extra) than the more recent stuff.

So, while the app has an impressive amount of comics, many of which are worth reading, it’s very rare for you to be able to fully catch up or complete them, making this a worse way to access a good chunk of its catalog than can be found elsewhere. For instance, if you want to read the big Shonen Jump series, you’re much better off going through the Shonen Jump app. While I don’t believe Crunchyroll has stated either way if they will be simulpubbing (when a chapter is released digitally at the same time as its physical release) for anything on the service, the fact that they have so few completed manga makes this seem unlikely. They’ve said they plan on adding additional chapters over time, but it remains to be seen what that will look like.

Perhaps the most frustrating element here is that this limitation undercuts the precise use case I imagined this service would fill: often, after you catch up with an anime, you’ll want to continue the story by picking up the manga where the anime ended. Unfortunately, at least in my case, I wasn’t able to find many manga on the service that scratched that itch: for recently aired shows, the anime for My Dress Up Darling, Dr. Stone, Kaiju No. 8, and The Summer Hikaru Died are all at or have gone past what’s included in Crunchyroll Manga.

Now, to be fair, I’m sure there are very legitimate licensing reasons why this is the case. Why would Viz want to give its competitor all of the latest chapters for its series when it has its own competing services? Why would Square Enix give Crunchyroll Manga all of My Dress Up Darling when it could instead overcharge users for heavily censored chapters on its own platform? I’m sure it’s a very difficult situation to navigate. At the same time, this is a service they’re asking users to pay money for, so it’s obviously justified to be critical here.

Perhaps the greatest boon for Crunchyoll Manga is just how bad things are outside Viz’s apps: I’m beating a dead horse, but Square Enix’s service is bad, and I’m not sure that Yen Press has one at all (strangely enough, using the Comic Plus app hooked up to a library subscription is actually a good option). Manga is so expensive that starting one on Crunchyroll Manga and then switching to some other means later (as long as they’re not also on Shonen Jump/Viz) may actually be a financially smart move in some cases. Moreover, there are a handful of complete series on there that I’m personally interested in checking out: Delicious in Dungeon, Sasaki and Miyano, and God Bless the Mistaken, to name my top three.

If there’s a big unanswered question regarding Crunchyroll Manga, it’s the update cadence for the service. Will it consistently add new chapters for months or years until some series eventually catch up? Or will it forever include only half or less of many of these manga, forcing you to find other ways to complete them? Until we have answers on that front, Crunchyroll Manga is a bit of a tough sell.

Elijah Gonzalez is an associate editor for Endless Mode. In addition to playing the latest, he also loves anime, movies, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Bluesky @elijahgonzalez.bsky.social.