Crunchyroll has already conquered anime, and now it's setting its sights on manga... again

There's a new manga reading app coming to town, this time from the anime juggernaut that is Crunchyroll.

This week at CES 2025, during Sony's press conference which brought all manner of reveals, Crunchyroll announced that it has a new app on the way, this time one that will let you read manga. According to Crunchyroll's own website, the app will "join the service as a premium add-on, slated to launch later in 2025," and that it will "launch as a standalone, called Crunchyroll Manga, on iOS and Android with web browser support planned for the future." Right now there's just plans to launch it in English in the US and Canada, with other languages to come at some point, but there was no word on when it might come to other territories.

Not only that, there wasn't even any confirmation as to what you'll even be able to read on it. Viz, one of the major manga publishers, has its own app, with titles like Inuyasha and Uzumaki available to read, and there's the Shonen Jump app too, where you can read pretty much every Weekly Shonen Jump title like Chainsaw Man and Jujutsu Kaisen. Crunchyroll could obviously pair up with other, smaller publishers, but some of the most popular titles around are already covered. And then, there's the issue of Crunchyroll itself.

In the first instance, it had a manga service right up until last month, but it wasn't particularly well liked, nor did it have that much to read on it. Outside of that, users and subscribers are constantly expressing frustrations with the anime app due to its poor usability and lack of features, so there's not much reason to be confident in a new app. It's not surprising that Crunchyroll wants to move into manga, too, but we'll have to see if the app is any good.