The End of Tachiyomi: Active Development Ends

It all comes tumbling down for Tachiyomi

Otaku Voice Staff

If you haven’t been paying attention recently, there has been some changes to the popular manga reader app, Tachiyomi. Just last week the app purged all links to extensions from directly in the app. Speculation was that Kakao Entertainment, a Korean manwa and entertainment conglomerate, had threatened legal action against the Tachiyomi team. Most of this was largely speculation from the community based on some activity associated with one of Kakao’s accounts. Speculate no more.

In a blog post earlier today, the Tachiyomi team confirmed that they are no longer actively developing the app going forward. Also confirmed is the involvement of Kakao Entertainment, and the threats of legal action.

I’m sad to announce that, with unanimous support from the fellow core contributors and support staff, the core Tachiyomi project will no longer be under active development due to recent events involving Kakao Entertainment Corp’s threats to both myself and others that have been involved with the project.

arkon from the Tachiyomi team

What Next for Tachiyomi?

Confirmed later on in the blog post, the repository and its source code will be taken down over the next couple of days. Social media accounts officially related to the development of the app will begin to be sunset. Current installs of the app will continue to work as is without any updates in the future. If you have an apk file of the app, it should continue to work as long as Android continues to support any of the libraries that Tachiyomi utilizes.

Reading through their Github page shows some interesting things. The first release of Tachiyomi, v0.1.0, was announced all the way back in January of 2016. The team was just shy of 8 years of releases. In that time they have put out 80 releases via Github. There have been 641 contributors to the project via code and translation work.

The app is licensed under the Apache-2.0 license which does mean that you can fork the code, make some changes, and release it under a brand new name with the same license. We are inevitably going to get a few versions of this come out of the woodwork as the original code base goes dark. It is inevitable in times like these when a perfectly viable platform goes under that a dozen copycats strike while the iron is hot and the community doesn’t have a champion. Kakao Entertainment has just made things worse for the otaku that never had intention of reading on their platform, or ever engaging in their copyrighted works hosted on sites unrelated to Tachiyomi.

Farewell to a Great Reader App

Obviously copies of Tachiyomi will continue to exist in the wild for some time to continue, but it is still sad to see such a great app get taken out by reckless and irresponsible legal action. The team that did great work on putting together an amazing app is being unjustly martyred for being the easiest and biggest target in Kakao’s war against consumers.

Here is one last piece from the farewell post I wanted to share –

I want to take the time to thank everybody who has been involved:

• The hundreds of global contributors, including to the app, extensions, website, and translations.
• The volunteers who helped manage/moderate Discord, GitHub, and the social media accounts; you all have ridiculous patience.
• Anybody who submitted feedback or bug reports, helping further improve the project.

And also a huge sorry to anybody who had pull requests that were left open, I was hoping to get to those at some point.

arkon from the Tachiyomi team

[Sources & Further Reading]
[Tachiyomi Blog Post]
[Tachiyomi Github Page]
[Tachiyomi Purges Source List]
[Image via Rotten Tomatoes & Wikipedia]
[Found via Reddit]