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BasouKazuma | 3 years ago
We're tracking all of the reader issues and feature requests like the ones you mentioned, but of course with a small team handling everything from development to licensing (our five founders are the only employees) we have to be really careful about what we prioritize.
As for image quality, we'll look into the specific issues you mentioned to see if they're present in the source files we get from Kodansha or not.
Re: Kaiten exclusivity, what we can say publicly right now is that our partnership goes deeper than just exclusives, and we're working on some projects that we'll hopefully be able to talk about soon. One visible thing it has helped us do is collaborate with Kaiten on cross-promotions for their titles without worrying that our efforts will push people to competitor services.
In terms of the calendar feature, we put out a release calendar a little while ago! https://www.azuki.co/release-calendar If you have more features you'd like to see from it, just let us know.
Azuki was always intended to be cross-platform. We believed really strongly that web had to be there because it's so accessible via links and search engines. But a lot of manga fans also look for places to read in the app stores, and we have competitors in those stores, so it was important to be able to compete there as well. You're right that cross-platform development is a challenge, but we get a significant share of our readership from Android and iOS, so we think it was the right call. We will continue to improve all platforms and everyone is free to decide when is the right time for them to use Azuki based on the features and content we have available.
Daiz|3 years ago
On the subject of apps, I'm not saying you shouldn't have apps, I'm just saying that there are certain things you should share across the web and apps, like the reader. Basically, you could have the reader running in a web view inside the mobile apps, and this way you could have just one reader codebase that gets reused across all the platforms. You could take this even further and build your mobile apps with web tech inside web views as well. You probably wouldn't do that at this point, but I would still recommend looking into using the reader in a web view at least, as that's no doubt the most complex frontend component in the entire system.