Why Sumi

There are already a hundred apps that translate a photo of Japanese text. None of them feel right when the photo is a manga page.

Manga is read as a story, not as a single image. You don't tap-translate one bubble at a time. You import a chapter, you settle in, you flip right-to-left, and you want every bubble already done by the time you get to it. When the AI gets a bubble wrong — and it will — you want a one-tap way to fix that bubble and keep reading, not a "report a problem" button or a paywall.

That's the gap Sumi is built for.

What's actually in the box

• Import a chapter. Photos, ZIP / CBZ, or a folder from iCloud Drive. Each import becomes a chapter that lives in your library forever.
• Translation runs on your manga, not on a single bubble. Every page of every chapter you import is processed end-to-end: detect bubbles, read the Japanese, translate to natural English, typeset back into the bubble shape. The reader shows pages as bubbles finish.
• Read in three modes. Toggle between Translated, Original, and a long-press peek that flips you to the opposite mode while you hold. Compare without losing your place.
• Fix one bubble in one tap. Bad translation? Tap the bubble. A bottom sheet shows the original Japanese (read-only) and the English (editable). Save. The reader refreshes immediately.

Two pipelines, one shape

Sumi ships with two translation tiers and you choose how you want to pay.

Offline buy-out — one-time $9.99. Sumi downloads the translation models (about 1.2 GB) the first time you use the offline tier; after that everything runs on your iPhone. Your manga never leaves the device. Quietly the best privacy posture you can ask for.

Pro — $4.99/month or $39.99/year. Each bubble round-trips to a state-of-the-art vision-language model (currently Google Gemini 3.5-flash) for the highest-quality translations. No downloads to manage, no storage to think about.

Either tier lets you preview the first three pages of any chapter for free, so you see translation quality on your own content before you spend a cent.

What's not in v1

A bunch of stuff that's on the roadmap but didn't make this version:

• Continuous-scroll webtoon support. Vertical-strip Korean / Chinese webcomics work, but the reader still treats them as discrete pages.
• A cross-device synced glossary. Right now the glossary builds locally per device.
• Anything that involves uploading your library to a cloud account. Identity in Sumi is your App Store device; there's nothing else.

Where to find us

• App: Sumi on the App Store — link goes live at launch.
• Email: hello@mangasumi.com

If you've ever wished a photo translator app understood that you wanted to read the whole chapter, give Sumi a try.