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KyuA mobile app for keeping track of your anime and manga
Kyu records what you watch and what you read, episode by episode, chapter by chapter. A pixel art companion, the Kyun, gains experience with every box you tick and evolves according to the genres you favour.
The problem
Knowing where you left off, series by series
Between a season still running, a manga picked up again after months and a franchise split into several parts, you lose the thread. The tools that exist are spreadsheets in disguise: you tick a box and nothing happens.
What I built
A companion that grows with your series
You look up a title, you tick an episode or a chapter, and the Kyun gains experience. It hatches, levels up, then evolves into one of three forms depending on the genre that dominates your log.
What it changes
A solid foundation under a light app
Every tick is a dated event, never a plain counter. That is what makes it possible to undo without erasing anything, to compute statistics you can trust, and to grow the companion from what you actually watched.
What it changes for my clients
Kyu is a personal project, but it stands as the reference for the mobile apps I offer. It shows a complete application built in ten days at a frozen scope: authentication, a database with per-user access rules, two external data sources, notifications, automated tests.
The choices made for Kyu are the ones I carry over to a client project: a service layer for every network call, no business logic in the screens, rules gathered in a single module, and a database that checks for itself what the app must not be allowed to do.
Key features
- Search and title pagesThe AniList catalogue, what is trending, and a page with progress, rating, studio, next episode and related titles
- Episode by episode trackingOne tap per episode or chapter, capped at the known total, with undo and bulk catch-up on a series or a whole franchise
- The Kyun, a pixel art companionThree stages, an experience bar, a hatching scene and three evolutions: Shonen, Shojo or Seinen, depending on your dominant genres
- Episode page and discussionTitle, synopsis and image for the episode, plus a public thread with spoiler tagging and reporting
- My List and homeA filterable list where the seasons of one series share a single card, and a home built around what is left to pick up and how far behind you are
- Broadcast notificationsAn alert when a new episode of a series you follow airs, switchable off in the settings
Safeguards
A bulk catch-up earns no experience, and the database refuses anything beyond the known episode total. Every account sees and changes only its own data, a rule the database enforces itself. Without the external sources (images, episode titles), the app keeps working on numbers alone.
Project status
Frequently asked questions
Is the app available on the stores?
Not yet. Kyu runs today as a development build on Android. Publishing to the stores is a separate step, and it has not been started.
Where does the series data come from?
From the public AniList catalogue for the titles, and from TMDB for episode names, synopses and images. Your progress, your ratings and your comments live in a separate database, on a Supabase account I run.
What if I tick an episode by mistake?
You undo it with a gesture. Nothing is erased: the undo is one more event in your log, and the experience taken back is exactly what the tick had given.
Why build Kyu?
Because I was tracking my manga in a notes app, and it annoyed me. I wanted something that records where I am, tells me what to pick up next, and makes it a little more alive than a list. Hence the Kyun.
Could you build a mobile app for us?
Yes. Kyu shows what I can do with Expo and a Supabase database: authentication, per-user data, notifications, external sources. We scope it together and deliver a usable version first.
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Talk about what I needCase study updated on 21 September 2026