Maru - ComicViewer/TextReader

Review by eFreeware

Most phones come with a viewer for PDFs and little else. If your reading lives in folders of scanned pages, zipped chapters, subtitle files or plain text, you end up juggling several tools that each handle one format badly. Maru, from developer 마루치아라치, is built to be the one app you open instead.

It is a free download in the Comics category, ad-supported, and it has been on Google Play since October 2012. The install count sits above a million, and its average rating is 4.9 from 58,976 ratings. That is an unusually high score for a utility with this many moving parts, and it suggests the app has kept a loyal following over a long stretch.

What interests me most is the scope. The developer describes a single reader that handles text, comics, PDF and EPUB, pulls files from local storage, USB drives or remote servers, and remembers where you stopped in each one. That combination is rare enough that it is worth walking through what each part actually does.

One reader for formats that usually need several

The app does not supply any books, comics or manga of its own. It is a viewer, so the library is whatever you already have on your device or can reach over a network. Text support covers TXT, CSV, SMI, SUB and SRT, plus EPUB with text and picture display. Comic support is broader: JPG, PNG, GIF, BMP, WEBP, TIFF, HEIC and AVIF images, along with PDF.

Compressed files are where this gets useful. Rather than unpacking a ZIP or RAR first, you can open the archive directly and read from inside it, and the same applies to 7Z and the ALZ/EGG formats. CBZ, CBR and CB7 comic archives are recognized too. The developer also mentions zip streaming and double compression, which matters if your collection was packed by a tool that nests folders.

So the core experience is straightforward: point the app at a file, and it renders it as a book.

Comic reading with real control over the page

For comics, the details that matter are direction and zoom. Maru supports left-to-right and right-to-left paging, the latter being the Japanese style, plus a landscape two-page view. That means a scanned volume reads the way it was printed rather than mirrored. Zooming goes up to 8x on PDFs with a sharpen option that kicks in as you magnify, which is the kind of touch that matters on dense artwork or small lettering.

You can turn pages with arrows, volume buttons, a scroll tab or by dragging. The animation options include left-right scroll, up-down scroll and a webtoon scroll mode built for very long vertical images, which the developer says handles those smoothly. You can also keep a picture zoomed in as you move between pages, rotate manually or let JPEG and WebP rotate automatically, apply filters such as inversion, sepia or sharpen, and crop edges.

Bookmarks can be added, renamed, sorted and looked up, and a slideshow runs on a timer you set in seconds. Navigation shortcuts come in several forms: a navigation bar, a dial and direct page entry. For anyone reading long series, the combination of bookmarks and quick page jumps is what keeps a session from turning into endless swiping.

Text, EPUB and listening rather than looking

The text side is just as configurable. You can change fonts between sans-serif, serif and a custom font, adjust size, spacing and margins, and switch character encoding between automatic and specific options such as UTF-8. Text and background colors are adjustable, and a background image can be set behind the page. Text can be left-aligned or justified, and wider screens get a two-column horizontal view.

Speech settings let you pick a language, set the pace, and skip kanji or special characters. That last detail suggests the developer had East Asian text in mind, where a reader would otherwise stumble over symbols that should not be spoken. A slideshow with adjustable speed and a search that works either one match at a time or across the whole document round out the reading tools, and there is basic editing for adding or changing text files.

Page turning follows the same pattern as the comic viewer: arrows, screen taps, drags or volume buttons, with effects like roll over, slide, swipe and scroll. Brightness can be adjusted quickly from inside the reader. None of this is unusual on its own, but having it in the same app as the comic tools is the point.

Files, history and reaching your library over a network

The file browser colors each item by how far you got: red for recently opened, green for partially read, blue for finished. That is a small idea that saves a lot of guessing when a folder holds dozens of volumes. Preview can be tiled at large or small size or shown in a detail view, extensions can be filtered, and sorting runs by name, size or date. Files can be deleted, renamed, copied and moved from inside the app, archives can be unpacked manually, and search covers file names, file contents and pictures.

Remote access is unusually broad for a free reader. Supported remote sources include SFTP, FTP, SMB for Windows shared folders and Samba, WebDAV, Google Drive, Dropbox and Microsoft OneDrive. Reading history can be synchronized automatically, which is the feature that would matter most to someone reading the same series on a phone and a tablet. Settings can be backed up and restored, with compatibility noted for Maru and Arar.

There is also USB storage support with read and write access for FAT32, NTFS and exFAT drives, so a memory stick or external drive can serve as the library. A password lock is available, themes and colors can be changed, and the interface language can be set among Korean, Chinese, Japanese, English and others. Samsung S-pen owners on Note 9 and above can turn pages and pause a slideshow with the pen, and headset or Bluetooth media buttons can pause a slideshow or text-to-speech.

What it asks of you before it will run

And since Maru ships no content, it is only as useful as the library you bring to it. Someone with nothing but a couple of store-bought EPUBs will not see much of the app's range.

The other consideration is cost. Maru is free and ad-supported, with no in-app purchases. That is a fair trade for an app with this much functionality, though it does mean the experience is not entirely uninterrupted. The remote features also imply a network and a server or cloud account on your side, since the app is connecting to storage you already have rather than providing it.

Fonts, encodings, page effects, filters, rotation and shortcut management all sit in one place. That density is a strength for someone who wants control, but it is not a stripped-down viewer, and the developer's own summary leans on the word powerful rather than simple.

Who gets the most from a reader like this

The clearest fit is someone with an organized personal collection: scanned comics, downloaded archives, subtitle files, long text documents and PDFs, all sitting in folders that a phone's built-in viewer cannot open at all. If your reading is spread across CBZ files, a NAS share and a cloud drive, Maru is designed to be the single front end for all of it.

It also suits readers who care about the mechanics of the page. Right-to-left paging, two-page landscape views, webtoon scrolling, persistent zoom and edge cropping are the kinds of settings that separate a comfortable reading session from a frustrating one, and they are all present here. The reading history colors and automatic synchronization are aimed at people working through long series over weeks rather than dipping into a single file.

Text-to-speech with language and speed controls extends that to listening, and the pen and media button support suggests the developer thought about people reading on a Samsung tablet or with headphones. The 4.9 average across nearly 59,000 ratings points to a tool that has earned trust from exactly this kind of user.

A capable library app for people who already have the files

Maru is worth installing if you have a collection the standard Android viewers ignore. Format coverage is the headline: text, EPUB, PDF, image folders and the common archive types, opened directly rather than unpacked first. Add remote access over SFTP, FTP, SMB, WebDAV and three major cloud services, and the app can reach a library that lives well beyond the phone.

The trade-offs are set out plainly. It brings no content of its own, and it is ad-supported rather than paid. The interface carries a lot of settings, which is the price of the control it offers.

For someone with folders of comics and documents and a wish for one app to open them all, this is an easy recommendation. For a reader who just wants to open the occasional PDF, the depth here will go unused.

What's new in version 4.13.6

- Bug fixes