Zap! Pow! MangaYo! hits Italian App Store’s Top 10 on launch day
Belka’s Department of Exclamation Marks is pleased to announce that the “manga management” app, already used by 30,000 animation enthusiasts to track over 7 million mangas, is getting more features.
Developed with Belka’s help, MangaYo! launched the app at the Lucca Comics and Game Festival, one of Europe’s largest Comic Conferences. With over 10,000 first-day downloads, the app quickly secured the #4 spot in the Italian App Store’s Entertainment category.
Catering to a community of over 270,000, MangaYo! has become the prime source for manga in Italy, since it was founded in 2020 by Luca Molinaro and Matteo Porri.
Like so many entrepreneurs, Luca and Matteo were driven by the motivation to “scratch their own itch.” “We always knew we wanted to find a better way to organize our collections than the clumsy Excel files that many fans use,” says Luca, who with his colleagues spent a year developing the idea before partnering with Belka.
“Seeing this app going from an idea to something used by tens of thousands of other collectors is really a dream come true.”
Business unusual
“In some ways this is an unusual project for us,” says Belka’s CEO, Giulio Michelon. “Our focus has been shifting towards design systems, but as you can see on our website, we really love animation. We also really liked the team at MangaYo!, so it all made a lot of sense.”
To ensure speed, reliability, and user-friendliness, Belka’s developers used Expo, a React Native framework, to build the app. They chose Supabase to handle the infrastructure APIs on the backend, ensuring the app's long-term growth potential.
“Expo is great,” says Federica Vacca, lead developer at Belka. “It speeds up development by removing the need to work on native code or to ever touch Xcode or Android Studio. We could never have built this app in three months without it.”
The MangaYo! team was happy with the collaboration. “Belka was able to seize our ideas on the fly, prioritizing and developing the most successful ones, even with the little time we had available,” says Luca. “Without Fabrizio, Federica, and Anas, we would never have made it in time for our big release date.”
To be continued つづく
As MangaYo! transitions from an e-commerce site to an essential part of every manga fan’s life, the app is steadily growing, adding an average of 400 new users every day.
MangaYo! and Belka are working on new features to make the app even more useful and appealing to users.
“We’re always thinking of ways to add useful features for collectors, especially to strengthen the community aspect of the app,” says Luca Molinaro. “We’re really excited to release these features soon.”
“I wish I could tell you more,” says Luca d’Incà, Belka’s General Manager, “but I’m very busy right now reading this comic book that someone left on my desk.”
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