My Anime List (MAL) Officially Has an APP

For years My Anime List, also known as MAL, has been one of the main go to anime websites to learn more about anime and to create lists. This covers your watching, to watch and have watched list of anime. These lists also came with the added bonus of giving you fun stats. These include how much time you have spent watching anime and how many anime you have watched, including how many episodes you have seen.

Since the website itself offers so much to anime fans and is such a go to for information and functioned as a log, many users begged for an app but it was never actually made. This lead to unofficial MAL apps.

Thus I was really surprised to log in to MAL and see the notification that they now have their very own app.

The My Anime List app is available here:

• The Play Store
• The Apple Store

I have now got the app installed and took a quick look around to see if the app is worth while or there just to stop people asking for an app. After using it for a few days I thought I would share the experience so you can decide whether you want to download it yourself, or not.

The main set up of the navigation bar is pretty simple to use and self explanatory:

• Home Button – This shows general forum discussions, news and general things that are going on within the community side of the app. This place also highlights anticipated anime, character rankings and more based on the anime community’s actions.
• Seasonal Calendar – as the name suggests, this shows the anime releases for each season. The list can be sorted by members, start date or score. I personally go by start date for the current and next season list. The releases are also further divided into TV (new), TV (cont’d), ONA, OVA, Movie and Special making the types of anime easier to find. I do wish we had an ‘All’ option as well but this is fair enough. I was surprised by the inclusion of the archive of seasons past.

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• Search – When you click on the search icon it takes you to a page where you can type in and search for an anime title. It also offers you ‘now watching’; ‘trending’; ‘just added’; ‘top 10 airing’ and ‘top 10 upcoming’ lists. These lists do make it easier to see upcoming trends and see what anime you might want to explore if you want to be part of a ‘popular’ topic.
• Notifications – This is the section where they inform you of new anime being added to the database as well as which anime have started airing from your plan to watch list.
• My List – When I first loaded the app and logged in, the lists were blank. It took refreshing each list a few times before it actually relented and showed me my various lists.

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I liked the ease of marking an anime as ‘watching/completed/plan to watch/on hold/dropped’. As well as adding in how far into the anime you are and how you rate the show. I am a sucker for quick and easy logging like that. I am not one to like notification after notification, so I disabled all push notifications. Overall, the app is great for keeping tabs, making quick updates to your lists and rating anime. I also enjoyed the ease of watching the trailers for each anime on the app as well.

I probably won’t be visiting the main website as much anymore because of the app. However, I will not be abandoning the website for the app as I like the many different rankings and offerings it has, that the app just can’t yet compete with.