I got initially inspired by this other client (props to the dev), but I thought I could do a better job around the UI, as well as general features.
Roadmap
The current version (v0.1.1) is still very barebones in terms of features, so here’s a list of things I want to (hopefully) achieve by v1.0 (in no particular order):
Click to expand roadmap
Offline support
Search
Dictionary support (lookup words on click)
More list view options (list / grid / hybrid, compact / comfy, different card styles…)
Handwritten font (Klee?)
Calendar view (?)
A better mirror proxy server with proper caching for faster loading / downloads.
Notifications on new articles.
Read vs. Unread indications (and filtering)
WaniKani integration (to limit furigana to unknown items)
Allow to only show furigana on click.
iOS build.
Better large-screen support.
Going open-source!
And other little things. Suggestions welcome!
Download:
Kantan is available on Google Play as an open beta:
It’s about 16MB, most of which is just fonts (Noto Sans and Noto Serif are bundled). The app code itself is probably a fraction of that, as it’s a native app built with Jetpack Compose.
Suggestions welcome!
This is a very early version that I gobbled up in a couple weeks, so I’d love to hear your ideas on how to improve it. Don’t spare anything, from features, UI, behavior, to branding (icon, name, store description, etc…).
Kinda funny that while I was investigating some weird font issues with Wani (see A new native Android app), I realized that I’ve been seeing the same issues in Kantan as well…
I blamed it on my phone’s font but it turns out it’s non-linear font-scaling:
This causes the furigana’s height to be overblown, making it look far from the text when the font scaling is higher than 1:
Hello and thank you for your effort! It is always nice to see people in the community finding new ways or improve other’s work! I still cannot find your Kantan app in google store sadly (maybe it’s because i’m in Italy and I cannot see it? Dunno…). Let me know if there is a link to the app as I would really like to try it! Thanks in advance for any reply
The app is currently in Open Testing, so Google Play may not be promoting it in search yet (aside from the funky name which also doesn’t help).
It’s linked in the top post in this thread:
I’ve been quite busy recently with other life stuff, so I haven’t pushed an update in a while. One pending quick-fix update (the fix above) is blocked due to Google policy requirements around news apps. Will hopefully get back on it very soon, resolve the policy stuff and hopefully release an update!
It’s been a while!
The app has been unfortunately broken since around October ~ November 2025 due to changes to the NHK API (geo-fencing), and I kept procrastinating on a fix, particularly that I started work on a proxy for the app, and was very busy with other things
In any case, it’s finally fixed in v0.1.1. It’s a boring bug-fix release, until the proxy is completed:
Fixed news loading!
Note 1: some images may not load; I have no clue how to deal with this just yet, or whether it’s related to the new geofencing.
Note 2: it seems to be slightly slower, due to the back-and-forth needed to get the necessary geofencing cookies, where the latency adds up making requests to Japan and back.
Downloading the ~2MB news-list.json from NHK was already slow enough… hopefully the proxy should make all of this much faster in future releases, once ready.
Work-in-progress! Expect missing/incomplete features and/or bugs.
