Online, the slightest comment about an anime or a manga can give away what comes next to someone who is not there yet. People who watch at their own pace end up staying quiet, or avoiding every discussion until they have caught up.
Nakama gives the conversation back to everyone. Each person tracks their series episode by episode and volume by volume, and every episode has its own comment space, which only opens once the episode has been seen. It is our own product, from the first mockup to the store listings, and we run it ourselves.
Anything about an episode you have not seen never leaves our servers: not its title, not its comments, not its number in a notification. The app has nothing to hide, because it receives nothing.
A volume is tracked, rated and discussed just like an episode. Readers get their own pages, releases and notifications, instead of being guests in a viewers' app.
Marking as seen, rating and commenting fit in the same sheet. The episode comment is the only social building block: public by default, or kept to your crew, the people you follow who follow you back.
The same feed, page or notification does not hold the same thing depending on who reads it. Everything is filtered by that person's progress, series by series and episode by episode, every time it is shown.
Follows, crews, requests, blocks, mutes, private profiles: every relationship changes what one person can see of another. These permissions are checked on every request, and tested account against account.
Reports, community hiding, a word filter, posting limits and a minimum age: what the stores require of an app where people publish, and what it takes for the space to stay pleasant.
Episode and volume releases, replies, requests: everything arrives as a notification, with the same anti-spoiler rules down to the wording. New comments appear live on the episode you have open.
We built our own catalogue: more than 22,000 series, 200,000 episodes and 60,000 volumes, with their release dates, their seasons and the links between an anime and its manga.
The app comes in French and English, from episode titles to notifications. Every comment keeps its language, and everyone reads the ones they understand first.
A fix reaches phones the next time the app opens, signed by us, without going back through store review. Before each release, a copy of production is put to the test to make sure nothing breaks.
An in-house studio produces the brand's visuals in the app's art direction, so the product and what we say about it are one and the same.