The mining landscape on iOS has come a long way. Not too long ago you couldn’t mine anything, and now you can mine websites and light novels and even important cards directly into the Anki app for iOS. Things are way better than they used to be.
And yet, there’s no options for mining from manga on iOS. And that’s pretty wild considering the popularity of manga! What’s even worse is that [one developer seems to have already accomplished it](https://github.com/juanj/KantanManga/pull/62) and then seemingly abandoned his app without ever pushing that functionality to the store. There’s even a chat record in the issues page of the dev and someone else discussing the feature as being finished. And yet, they never released it. That’s wild.
I know that the easy solution is “switch to Android” but if you live in Japan iPhones are the phone to have. There are many reasons to own an iPhone if you live in the land of the rising sun, and therefore simply switching to Android isn’t really a solution to the problem as it will just create problems in other areas.
It’s a shame that nobody else is willing to tackle this problem. I sometimes see posts from developers in different parts of the community looking to reinvent the wheel with what they think is the latest and greatest tool since sliced bread. And sometimes that leads to some seriously useful tools like asbplayer, but usually it leads to Anki Clone number 6054. It’s a shame that nobody is actually looking to solve the problems that actually exist for users and instead want to make lesser versions of existing tools.
(This is just a rant so please don’t get offended by anything that I’ve said)
At the very least, at least we can mine from websites and light novels.
5 comments
You should read [the post](https://www.reddit.com/r/Anki/comments/c6a2bp/why_is_ankidroid_free/eseppqi/) The AnkiDroid creator once made answering why AnkiDroid is free everywhere except on iOS. Apple does not make life easy for app developers, that’s why you’re seeing this lack of options.
Honestly I would recommend either biting the bullet and switching to Android, or just getting a laptop and doing your mining from there.
But I’m curious, what kind of issues you would run into if you switched to Android? I’ve never heard of this.
Can I confirm what you mean by mining manga? Are you talking about making cards out of lines from manga or something?
I’m working on it for iOS/macOS. Manabi Reader now has an AR text scanning mode you can use. But PDF, epub, manga support is WIP.
https://reader.manabi.io
It has Anki integration and it remembers every sentence you read
I’ve quit my job to focus on this full time so please let me know if there’s anything else you need added.
I didn’t know there was even a reliable option for this on Android?
Every kanji OCR reader I’ve tried has worked so poorly I gave up and just create my own cards.
This doesn’t just apply to iOS regarding manga OCR. But that’s understandable, given it’s a lot more complicated and takes more work.
Besides this, manga scans and manga themselves are often very hard to OCR since the text is often handwritten or low quality. Personally, for mining I just stick to subbed videos or visual novels, as I can get the audio for words and sentence, and the experience is just generally faster/easier.