Manga UP‪!‬ 17+

tldr; a great app to read official translations and support the staff. Think of it as renting manga to read for about half the price of outright buying the manga. Supporting minor titles and older publications.

Manga Up is a great way to read some titles that may have never made it to the big book stores in America. Honestly the pricing scheme is very fair considering the work authors and translators put in. You get ~7 “chapters” free a day with each new series have 1-2 free ones to see if you like it. Now a chapter in this app is broken into sections so a real chapter in a physical book would be split up into ~4 sections. Sometimes it feels short but if you compare the price of buying coins to read it all it would come out to about half the price it takes to buy a physical copy.

i only lasted 35 minutes on the app before deleting for two reasons. first and most noteworthy thing to mention is that the chapters cost 40-90 coins per chapter and those coins can be obtained with money thru the app. normally thats fine, most manga apps have a monthly subscription or the volumes can be purchased as a whole and read that way.. but this app doesn’t allow you to keep the chapters you’ve purchased. they’re merely available to you for up to 3 days. second thing to mention (biggest reason i deleted) is that these chapters that you pay for and are only available to you for 3 days are broken up. i got so confused when i went to read and one single chapter was broken up into 8 segments. EIGHT. 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 10.4 etc. each segment costing 80 coins. that’s 640 coins for a SINGLE chapter. i went to the shop to see what the coin prices were and they’re about on par with other apps. 650 coins for $4. which sounds okay but remember, because they split it up, you’re paying $4 for a single chapter. if the manga you’re reading has 100+ chapters and each chapter is broken into 5-10 segments priced at 80 coins a segment.. you’re spending way more money than it’s worth. imo this isn’t the app for me. truly surprised others even use it, there are far better, cheaper options that allow you to retain what you’ve purchased than this - i suggest one of those.

I’m positively baffled at how this horrid software made it out the door. To begin, the way the service itself is structured is still a mystery to me. There are a total of 3 currencies which you use to unlock chapters, and even if you paid for the currency to unlock chapters they’re only unlocked for three days? On top of that, manga chapters are artificially broken into several parts meaning you have to spend MORE money to read everything. If my math is correct, it’s cheaper to buy print for some of these series. At least then you get to keep the manga forever and not just THREE DAYS. Oh, and screenshooting is a ban-able offense.

Furthermore, the catalogue of series on offer is incredibly lackluster, too. Lots of vapid, erotic schlock and only a handful of standout series. Even if you find something you’d want to read, the app has issues of blank pages requiring a restart.

I don’t understand why they couldn’t have a monthly subscription like other services do. Every single aspect of this app is so blatantly anti consumer that I’m shocked that it launches in the state it did. If they do a complete overhaul of the entire structure of the app, maybe there’s something here- but for now- don’t even think about downloading this.