AniList in 2026: The Tracker That Didn’t Get Sold
profit from company acquisition shutdowns.
If you’ve never used one, an anime tracker is basically a logbook. You add a show, mark whether you’re watching it, finished it or gave up on it, note which episode you’re on, and slap a score on it when you’re done. Do that for a few years and you’ve got a record of everything you’ve watched, plus a score that feeds into the community average everyone else browses. Letterboxd for anime, more or less, with manga thrown in. AniList has been doing this since 2013. What makes it worth writing about this year isn’t a new feature. It’s that MyAnimeList, the big one, got bought. Gaudiy Inc., a Tokyo blockchain and AI outfit backed by Sony Group and Bandai Namco, closed the acquisition on May 7, 2025 for about 531 million yen, roughly $3.5 million. Fans did not take it well. And Kitsu, the open-source option people used to recommend, has quietly gone dark: Android app pulled from Google Play in April 2024, web development stalled by early 2025. So the field thinned out, and AniList is what’s left standing on its own. The day-to-day stuff is good, too. Scores come as percentages off big sample sizes, so you get things like Gintama: THE FINAL at 91% from almost 56,000 users, which tells you more than a five-star average ever would. Seasonal charts live on AniChart. There’s no official app, which sounds like a gap until you look at what the API has produced: clients on Android, iOS, macOS, Windows and Linux, all community-built. Otraku is ad-free by design. AniHyou even ships a Wear OS version, which is a slightly absurd thing to exist and I’m glad it does.