Crunchyroll’s New Manga App Could Transform the Market

Graphic: Polygon | Source images: Trigger / Toho / OLM / Toei / Shueisha / Kadokawa / Square Enix

Keeping pace with the top manga releases can be surprisingly cumbersome, even in the digital age. In Japan, rights are spread across multiple publishers, forcing many Western readers to manage several apps, storefronts, and subscriptions. Crunchyroll aims to simplify that with Crunchyroll Manga, a dedicated digital manga app from the anime streaming company that is set to arrive in the U.S. and Canada on Oct. 9 for iOS and Android, with a web portal following on Oct. 15.

First unveiled in January, Crunchyroll Manga will be showcased at New York Comic Con 2025 and launches the same day, Oct. 9, according to a company press release. The service debuts with partnerships from established publishers including AlphaPolis, COMPASS, Square Enix, VIZ Media, and Yen Press, with additional collaborators such as Shueisha, J-Novel Club, ThirdlineNEXT, and highstone expected to join later.

Initial reading options will encompass big-name series like One Piece, Jujutsu Kaisen, Daemons of the Shadow Realm, The Apothecary Diaries, Delicious in Dungeon, My Dress-Up Darling, The Summer Hikaru Died, Lycoris Recoil, Sasaki and Miyano, Tsukimichi: Moonlit Fantasy, Maiden of the Dragon: Falling for the Demon’s Lies, and many others.

For Western fans, that lineup hints at a potentially central destination for popular manga. While some publishers already operate their own platforms—Shueisha’s Manga Plus and Square Enix’s Manga UP!, for example—many titles remain fragmented across paid volumes, in-app purchases, or ticket systems, which adds up in cost and complexity for readers.

Crunchyroll Manga is being offered as a premium add-on to existing Crunchyroll subscriptions. The rollout pricing is:

• Crunchyroll Fan + Manga — $11.99 USD / $15.49 CAD per month (the Manga add-on priced at $4.00 USD / $5.50 CAD).
• Crunchyroll Mega Fan + Manga — $15.49 USD / $17.49 CAD per month (the Manga add-on priced at $3.50 USD / $5.00 CAD).

Subscribers on the Ultimate Fan tier ($15.99/month) will receive access to the manga library automatically. Across all eligible tiers, Crunchyroll says readers will enjoy ad-free, unlimited reading on mobile, tablet, and web, plus offline downloads. The company promises “hundreds of chapters from hundreds of titles” at launch, with the catalog growing over time.

One notable omission in the press materials is Kodansha, which operates its own K Manga service and uses a ticket-based model. That doesn’t rule out future licensing—popular Kodansha-owned series that also stream on Crunchyroll, such as Attack on Titan, Vinland Saga, Shangri-La Frontier, and Gachiakuta, could still appear in later library updates.

If Crunchyroll can genuinely gather the most-wanted series under one roof, it could simplify the experience for Western readers and offer a meaningful deterrent to piracy—a persistent problem that undercuts creators and publishers despite many anti-piracy efforts.

Source: Polygon