I know Tachiyomi (and associated forks) are a popular way to browse and read manga within the community (myself included). This change means that the Tachiyomi app will no longer include access to installation of all but a select few extensions. Specifically, the only extensions allowed going forward are the “bring-your-own” services. You can see the new extension list here.
Based on some of my searching, this change seems to be in response to the threat of legal action by Kakao Entertainment (a Korean webtoon company). Tachiyomi had recently removed a couple extensions from their app (mangadex being one of them), but this change is sweeping.
Going forward, if you have extensions currently installed on your device, they are going to stay there, but will no longer be maintained. So, if something breaks for the service it is communicating with, then the whole thing breaks.
The latest version of Tachiyomi added the ability to add external extension repositories. So, this enables the option of other groups maintaining extensions in the place of the Tachiyomi devs.
Edit: For more context, there are two relevant discussions on the [email protected] community. One about the mangadex extension specifically, and the other about this latest move.
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I am shocked I tell you, schocked. Who woulda thunk that blindly obeying any DMCA request, legitimate or not, would result in this? Absolutely unpredictable that companies would wildly abuse this power instead of using it responsibly…
youtube-dl was in a similar spot and it came out unscathed because unlike the wet noodles developing Tachiyomi their devs had the spine to at least use the means available to try and avert removal, which ultimately worked.
It’ll be interesting watching this develop further but given the devs and their decision I see a bleak future ahead, next up on the chopping block due to DMCA will be the 3rd party extension repo feature. Why would this scummy corpo stop after all? Not like they get any pushback for this blatant bullying.
Edit: looking at the dev response to this, the project just died. Instead of talking with the community and accepting some blame they just lock down and censor. No idea how it looks like in their discord server but likely nobody there is allowed to talk about this either.
Guess I’ll have to wait and see which fork pulls through and becomes the main one.
Hey, I also think that the whole ordeal sucks, but at least I’m not calling the devs names. If they removed the extensions, then there probably was a compelling reason for them to.
Anyway, it’s been barely a day since the removal. I’d say give it several days; viable workarounds will appear one way or another
I’m calling them names because they very clearly had no contingency plan for an event like this. You could maybe count extension repos as one but that’s really not a lot. Their entire policy was flimsy from the get go and they should have known that. I understand the devs don’t want to fight court battles and I’m not blaming them for that but they left several avenues of protection against stuff like this unused and if they clearly did not want the hassle they should not have included the extensions by default.
We also already have a workaround: some kind stranger forked the extension repo and has committed to updating at least some of them. I expect their repo will become the new unofficial “official” one.
How trustworthy is it tho
I skimmed through the code, it’s fine.
It is maintained by one of the old contributor/maintainer (they still contribute to the Tachiyomi app). I can say that it is the same trustworthiness as before because volunteers (so pretty much the same people) were also maintaining the old extensions repo. It is not easy to access those people directly from the contributors section in the repository, they also cleared the commit history (I think it is to protect from DMCA), so I won’t link a profile directly, but you can get an idea by examining the people on the project’s Discord. You can also review the code of the extensions you will use, the compilation process is quite transparent thanks to GitHub Actions and you will need to trust the extension again after the new extension updates and when it’s time to update, you can review the source code again. I hope I explained it clearly enough. If I said something that was not clear, I can elaborate.
welp, at least MangaDex still renders nicely on mobile browsers
It also can be installed as a PWA!
My tachiyomi library is enormous, so I am going to have to try to figure out something. Whether that is enabling an external extensions repo or migrating to another solution.
Another awesome thing is that their ReaperScans extension works!
For those that primarily used the Mangadex extension: Neko was (before yesterday) an endorsed fork that specifically used Mangadex, AFAIK without using the extensions repo. So if you’re like me and had the majority of manga using the Mangadex extension, that’s worth checking out. Seems like the Tachiyomi devs removed Neko from their endorsed forks section yesterday too. Presumably due to similar reason for removing all extensions.
The UI is quite different (I think based on another Tachiyomi fork), but it’s the same under the hood. That means you can simply restore from your Tachiyomi backup, so migration is easy.
This looks promising actually if it can restore from a tachiyomi backup. A killer feature I saw glancing over it was this:
- Filter by Scanlation Group in chapter list
I can’t tell you how many times I have been bingeing a series and have to rapidly flip through the terrible mtl chapters to get to the good human tl’d chapters. I just checked and 238/260 series in my tachiyomi are from mangadex, so I am going to give this one a try when I get a chance.
Spineless Devs
