Crunchyroll is officially returning to the manga industry with a new app, and it could change the industry forever. When Crunchyroll first started becoming big, they attempted to expand into manga with Crunchyroll Manga, a digital manga anthology that was the exclusive publisher of Kodansha manga, but due to numerous issues, including Kodansha removing most of their titles, Crunchyroll Manga slowly fell into disarray and was discontinued in December 2023.

Crunchyroll might have stepped out of the manga game for a while, but they’re about to return to it. Crunchyroll made a variety of announcements at Sony’s recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and chief among them was how Crunchyroll will return to the manga industry with Crunchyroll Manga, a new app intended as a add-on to its subscription service sometime in 2025. Not much is known about the new app, but so long as it avoids the biggest problems of the old service, it could make Crunchyroll bigger than ever.

What Crunchyroll Manga Can Do To Avoid Its Predecessor’s Problems

Everything Crunchyroll Manga Has To Do To Succeed

As exciting as the Crunchyroll Manga app is, it needs to do a few things to avoid the issues of the Crunchyroll Manga anthology. For starters, the Crunchyroll Manga anthology was criticized for its poor layouts, loading time, and picture quality, issues that only got worse over the years as the service was increasingly neglected up until it was discontinued. The Crunchyroll Manga app needs to have better and more consistent performance than the digital anthology that preceded it, and if Crunchyroll is bothering to bring it back at all, there’s no reason to expect anything less.

The biggest issue that needs to be dealt with, of course, is the size of their library. Even before losing most of their titles for Kodansha’s K-Manga app, the Crunchyroll Manga digital anthology had a notably small library of titles ongoing and completed alike, so above all else, the Crunchyroll Manga app needs to have as large a library of titles for people to read as possible if it wants to succeed. Crunchyroll has taken great strides to acquire new anime titles in recent years, and hopefully, that process can be repeated with their manga, as well.

Crunchyroll’s New Manga App Can Solidify Their Place In The Anime Industry

It’s undeniable that Crunchyroll is one of anime’s biggest streaming services, as not only do they have more titles than most other websites, but they even involve themselves in the production of anime like In/Spectre and Tower of God, as well. Now, with Crunchyroll making a genuine effort to get back into manga, Crunchyroll Manga can make Crunchyroll the definitive home for anime by giving it just as big a foothold in manga; having a single site for anime and manga would be great to see, so hopefully, Crunchyroll’s new app will make that as easy as possible.

Source: Crunchyroll press release.