It's sad to see companies threatening completely legal projects, knowing that the volunteering developers don't have the time and money to win a lawsuit against a large company with lawyers. It's nothing less than bullying volunteers, or similar to SLAPP suits.
i'm so fucking sad that a shitty¹ company was able to bully a 100% legal piece of FOSS to shut down.
It is THE best app for reading manga, and it single-handedly started my love and (healthy) addiction to reading manga lol. It's also one of the best examples on how a FOSS model is superior to any competitive proprietary one.
I hope so much luck to the devs and every contributor. Their work through all these years is immeasurable. Makes me regret a little for not trying to contribute to the community with some code at a time I was wanting to. Thanks for all the hours of fun reading manga. I'm sure at this very moment people are already organizing a fork to live on Tachiyomi's legacy, as is the spirit of FOSS.
There are already a few actively maintained forks of Tachiyomi. TachiJ2K and TachiyomiSY are two such popular forks which have several features not present in the original app. In fact, many hardcore manga readers in the community had already switched to them years ago. There's also Aniyomi, which not only supports manga but also watching anime via extensions, the same way you'd read manga in Tachiyomi.
So thanks to the power of FOSS, Tachiyomi already continues to live on and you don't need to wait for a fork.
oh yeah, I heard about the already forked projects before, certainly awesome that people already have that option. I do use Aniyomi, and it's pretty damn good.
For some reason I've never felt like I needed extra features that the main project didn't have, so I've never looked out for forks. But looking at some of the forks right now they seem pretty good as well and do have features that would be super useful to me. Certainly will try it out.
Thanks for the info! I just backed up my Tachiyomi data and imported it into TachiyomiJ2K and it crashes immediately upon launch now, so not super thrilled about the switch so far.
You could still get the actual comics anywhere, convert em to .cbz, and chuck em in some folders named by series. In that sense, Tachiyomi should keep working forever.
It's really only the streamlined online sources that'll break over time, and no new features will get added.
Lucky for us, looks like it'll be getting forked and live on as "Mihon".
So does Tachiyomi also provide the external sources? My impression was they just did the app, and you got things from elsewhere, but I've never used it (or even heard of it before today).
It's also already got 3 forks, they link them on their website.
There's a number of existing forks already. Most of them for porn. For the ones that have integrated with the last Tachiyomi update that removed native extensions, what you'll be able to do is set a repository as an upstream apk source for whatever extensions you want. There's plenty of those already on github. You just have to look for them.
As someone who has used this app for at least 6 years, I am very sad to see this happen.
I'm surprised they weren't able to get away with it after the change in extensions a couple versions ago. By not shipping extensions that have copyrighted content that should have been enough, similar to how emulators, services like Plex and torrenting applications survive.
It's effectively just a comic / manga reader that can be used for piracy when the right extensions are added.
Apparently that wasn't enough, and I can't blame open source devs for not wanting to start a legal battle with a profit-earning company.
For now, the app does allow you to add external repository's (list of extensions for various sources) that are still being updated, and I believe there are at least a few forks of the project that will survive for now.
All I can say is great work to the dev team for sticking with us until now and I wish you luck in your future ventures.
The internet doesn't "host" anything, as much as also Tachiyomi doesn't.
The developers are archiving the project because Kakao is not satisfied even after they removed the default extension integration. Kakao have no legal grounds to advance more requests, but they can because for Tachiyomi's devs this was merely a hobby and they are not interested to start a legal war, even if they would win.
unfortunate to see, it's been a great app for a long time. Anyone know of an alternative that's good? I mostly just read on mobile through firefox on mangafire now, but would love if an app offered a better experience
It exists in the same category as pop corn time and Kodi. Sure its legal but to make it do illegal things is so easy it might as well be illegal itself from the start.