The Mobile MAL

During the many hard times that may occur over the span of your anime otaku life, sometimes internet fails and leaves your tracking a terrible mess. Of course, this is under the expectation that even without internet, you are still watching anime because something so insignificant as internet obviously can't inhibit anime consumption. So, for the most part, this is under the assumption that for whatever reason, your computer can't be used to keep a history of your escapades or you just really want to keep your list bleeding edge despite nobody caring. With this assumption in mind, the goal is the most convenient and painless way to keep your list updated on minimal internets, aka around 50 kbps aka 6.25 kB/s or slightly less. This speed was picked because t-mobile has a bunch of asshats who believe in throttling unlimited data after reaching some bullshit arbitrary limit. It's not fucking unlimited if you are going to put a limit on it.

So that brings us to the wonderful MAL clients available to us for android because I don't have or want iOS stuff (aside from my ipods). As with many projects related towards anime fandom, they either die really really quickly or die slow deaths, examples will be Herro and MAL respectively. There was no reason to point out any examples, but I did anyways. Anyways, there are a number of MAL clients and this will probably end up being similar to the manga viewer post. Once again, I'll state what I'm planning on judging this time as well. Primarily interface will be rather important, as well as speed. While extra features are definitely a plus, having a MAL client do the basic shit is essential, which includes updating your anime/manga list with additions, removals, scores, changing statuses, and giving some info about anime. To make things more confusing, we will be going in reverse order.

The list of android MAL clients I'm looking at:
- Atarashii!
- Pocket MAL Client
- MAL for Android 2
- Momo MAL
- MALO

MALO: At some point, I'm sure someone thought this was a good idea. Stick MAL with an ugly UFO icon that probably isn't a UFO icon and give it the most basic of navigation. The top has your lists that I'm sure everyone is familiar with, the Watching, Completed, On-Hold, Dropped, Plan to Watch. The bottom of the screen has a simple toggle between anime and manga lists. There is no sliding, everything is a tap to navigate. Aside from that, you have a bar that allows you to refresh/sync your lists, search for anime in your list, or search for anime not in your list. The menu button gives you the option of settings (of which there are 2...one to say if you want your manga list or your anime list first, and the other to toggle images), a broken stats button, and the option to log out of your MAL account. Unfortunately, this is where the review ends, because it still hasn't loaded my lists... In short, it's buggy at best, the UI is old, and shit just doesn't work on the throttled interwebz available to my phone at the moment. Giving this one a rank would be like giving last place 3rd. There is nothing worse than this one. Skip it and move on.

Momo MAL: So this one promises Momo from ToLOVERu which is great, because who doesn't like Momo? She's like the only one actively trying to get with Mr. Impotent and get the anime moving somewhere. Unfortunately, aside from the great icon choice and some slight jabs with shit like "Momo is sad!!", this app doesn't load my list either. It tries for a second or two before it gives up, which isn't nearly enough time to get the list on slow internet. The UI itself isn't too bad either. There is a single sidebar that can bring you to your bullshit stats, Anime list, Manga list, search, and synchronize. Sure the preferences aren't actually preferences but instead is just the option to logout or Rate app/Like facebook page and the About page, but w/e just label shit preferences anyways. If it had anything really going for it, it would be that the list interface is a nice sliding one so you can swipe across the screen to go between your Watching, Completed, etc. In this case, it's better than MALO so it gets a 4/10.

MAL for Android 2: Don't ask what happened to the first one, that died many moons ago. This client sports an ugly glossed icon and keeps things simple. There are no side bars at all and the menu button only provides you with the option to donate. No, you can't log out. There is the main bar at the top which provides the basic toggle for anime or manga list, sync/refresh, search, and the menu button. The rest is dedicated to your media list, with a cropped landscape image of the portait anime poster fitting 6 series per screen. On top of those are a simple tinted overlay that has the title and the watching count or score if it's in completed. Tapping on an anime brings up the full poster, you can change all of the basics, some stats about the anime, and a summary on the bottom. The main bar also changes to give you a direct link that you can open in a browser of your choice and the option to remove the anime from the list. Aside from everything being colored in MAL blue, it's not all that bad. It has some hickups with my snailweb and thus some of the images don't load fully, but it works. All in all, it's barely passable with a 5/10. Honestly if your internet isn't snailnet, Momo MAL might be a better choice though because if it weren't for that lacking bit about having really shit tier internet, it would probably be better than this one.

Pocket MAL Client: This is where things start to pick up in the UI deparment. Almost everything about this UI has a bit of sliding. The left sidebar is the navi for Watching, Completed, etc. and it even shows the number in each list along with shareable "how many days I watched anime" stat. The right sidebar has a toggle for anime or manga, the recently watched page that includes stuff added to plan to watch, and a user search. Pulling down brings out a text filter that narrows down your current list based on what is currently in the text field, and it works wonderfully. The very top bar has the generic refresh/sync, search, and menu button. The settings are actually decent settings that have a use, such as syncing at application start, showing tags, pop ups after doing certain actions (changing score, status, progress, etc.), and the godsend auto date which sets the start and finish dates for you. The list view is also fantastic and seems to employ a mix of caching loaded images and lazy loading images as needed. So stuff you frequently scroll through are already cached on your phone, and stuff that you don't see as often will pull as needed. It makes for a really nice look even without good internet. Each series is put on a card with 3 cards per screen that shows the anime poster, title, status of the anime, type (OVA, ONA, TV, etc.), your score, and your progress. Long-pressing a card puts a +1 progress button over the poster, otherwise there is a ellipsis menu button on each card that you can use. Selecting an anime brings up all of the info in a nice layout with pretty much everything you could want to access on top and the finer anime details below. You can set score, progress, dates, status, and even tags. Aside from the right sidebar (which has a gap between the anime/manga toggle and the other menu options...probably on purpose...but in general there is just something I don't feel is right with having the right menu bar, it's way beyond personal preferences here though), everything is really well done and so this app deserves a 9/10.

Atarashii!: One of the newer clients that does a couple things I find rather convenient even though their uses are severely limited without some better internet. Luckily, they all fall under pluses and thus it's not like I'm going to judge extra features under the same bullshit internet restriction that I have. This client follows a similar UI to MAL, showing 4 posters per screen with no wasted space and overlayed with the title, a menu button, and the current progress. The menu buttons give +1 progress and mark as completed options. Follows the same sort of thing as Pocket MAL with respect to poster cache management which is nice and has a simple slide to swap between manga and anime lists which is REALLY nice. A single button on the top bar is your navigation for Watched, Completed, etc. and is followed with a search button for MAL and a menu button that provides sync, logout, about, and settings. The settings provided are nice and deal specifically with how the app displays information to you and when to sync. Probably the best setting is the ability to toggle if the list should be shown with covers OR a traditional list view with cropped posters and it can fit 7 series per screen. Choosing a series shows things completely opposite to Pocket MAL, and instead of all the interactable things first, it's all of the information about the series first. It also doesn't have the finer details of the anime series (not that they matter too much...but some stuff like genre would have been neat). Here is where the judging stops, and I give a rating of 9/10. Fortunately, that is not all there is to Atarashii, as it has a sidebar that can bring up a profile page, your lists, friends, Top Rated, Most Popular, Just Added, and Upcoming series. The latter features are fantastic for finding new series to add and follow. It joins together a number of things into a single experience so you don't have to go searching around for the latest chart or anything.

So after another steel wall of solid text, we come to the conclusion of which MAL client is better. Between Atarashii and Pocket MAL, it's really sort of a toss up of preferences. As just a MAL client, Pocket MAL is spectacular and covers pretty much everything that you can do in MAL with your lists with a great UI and Auto Date. For something that can give you a fairly complete experience from season to season, Atarashii can cover you with it's pages for the upcoming anime and even stuff you might want to check out. Now all we need is for the two clients to combine together to pierce the heavens and have an application that looks fucking amazing, can do everything you can do with MAL for series editing, AND provide shit from start to finish. For myself, I will be sticking with Atarashii since my current flow relies mainly on the computer for starting series and so having the ability to search for new series that strike my fancy and add those to my list while on the go trumps having Auto Date in my case.

- Edit 09/04/24 -

I thought I would add one more to the list because it's going to be short. The application is called "AnimeTrakr" and it has a rather nice UI along with the ability to look at the running anime. There are some things that make keeping up-to-date really nice with screencaps of episodes and things. The only really problem is that those features apparently cost money and as far as I can tell, there isn't any MAL sync in the free version.