Manga • Manhwa • Manhua • Web Novels — a story told by lamplight.
Hibana is a free, open-source reader for Android, written in Kotlin and Jetpack Compose. The name is a coined compound — 灯 lamplight + 話 story/episode — and 話 doubles as "chapter" across manga and web novels.
It reads comics (manga, manhwa, manhua) and web/light novels from third-party extensions, and it runs extensions from four ecosystems at once: Mihon/Tachiyomi, Manatan, IReader, and LNReader.
Anime is not part of this app. Video playback is a possible future phase of the wider project, not a goal of this codebase.
Library
- Categories (custom shelves) with tabs, plus per-entry assignment
- Tri-state filters (downloaded / unread / started) — off, only, or exclude
- Sort by title, total chapters, unread count, latest chapter, date added, random
- Comfortable grid, compact grid, or list, with unread/downloaded cover badges
- Long-press multi-select for batch actions
Reading
- Text reader with font size, line spacing, font family, and 5 themes
- Comic reader with five page layouts: webtoon (continuous), gapped vertical strip, paged left-to-right, paged right-to-left (Japanese manga), and paged vertical (e-reader style)
- In-reader settings overlay so type and layout are adjusted while reading
- Missing-chapter detection from chapter numbering, plus upload dates
Text-to-speech and translation
- Reads novel chapters aloud — play/pause/skip, speed, pitch, paragraph highlighting and auto-scroll, with a foreground playback service
- Reads comics aloud too, via on-device OCR (ML Kit: Latin, Japanese, Korean, Chinese). Panel order is corrected per script, so right-to-left Japanese pages narrate in reading order rather than detection order
- On-device translation into English or Hindi
- Narration language: English or Hindi
Sources and extensions
- Four ecosystems supported side by side:
- Mihon / Tachiyomi and Manatan — APK extensions, via a bundled
eu.kanade.tachiyomisource-api runtime - IReader — APK extensions, against the published
io.github.ireaderorg:source-api - LNReader — JavaScript plugins, executed on Rhino (plugins compile to ES5, so no NDK or per-ABI splits are needed)
- Mihon / Tachiyomi and Manatan — APK extensions, via a bundled
- Extension stores: add any repository index URL, including custom and
self-hosted ones. Both
index.min.json(Mihon-style) andplugins.min.json(LNReader) are detected automatically - Update detection, language filtering, and per-source browsing (Popular/Latest)
- Trust model: APK extensions run in-process, so they are not loaded until you approve them. Trust is keyed on package plus signing certificate, so an update re-signed by someone else must be approved again
Discovery
- Global search across every installed source, results grouped per source, each group appearing as soon as that source responds
- Browse split into Sources | Extensions | Migrate
Source migration
- Move entries when a source breaks or falls behind — one title, several, or an entire source at once
- Candidates are matched by normalised title plus author, scored and shown with a chapter-count comparison; nothing moves until you confirm
- Reading progress is re-matched by chapter number, so it survives the move
- Search all sources, or restrict to a chosen subset
Library upkeep
- Updates tab with newest chapters across the library
- Scheduled updates: manual, 6h, 12h, 24h, alternate day, weekly (day + time), or monthly (date + time)
- Download manager with queue, retry, and delete
- Backup and restore in Mihon's
.tachibkformat — a Hibana backup restores into Mihon, and a Mihon backup restores into Hibana
Requires JDK 17 and the Android SDK (Android Studio Ladybug or newer).
gradle wrapper --gradle-version 8.11.1 # first time, to create ./gradlew
./gradlew :app:assembleDebug
./gradlew :app:installDebugThe binary gradle/wrapper/gradle-wrapper.jar is intentionally not committed;
gradle wrapper regenerates it, and Android Studio does so on first sync.
| minSdk | 26 — the floor declared by io.github.ireaderorg:source-api-android |
| targetSdk | 34 |
| compileSdk | 36 — required by androidx.core 1.17 |
| Kotlin | 2.2.21 (matches what IReader extensions are built against) |
| Gradle / AGP | 8.11.1 / 8.9.1 |
Releases are signed. Android ties app identity to the signing key: an update signed by a different key is rejected, so the key must stay stable and private.
Create a keystore and keep it somewhere safe and backed up:
keytool -genkeypair -v -keystore hibana-release.jks -alias hibana \
-keyalg RSA -keysize 4096 -validity 10000If this file is lost, no future build can update an already-installed Hibana. The only remedy is uninstall and reinstall, which loses local data. Back it up before shipping anything.
Local signed builds — copy keystore.properties.example to
keystore.properties and fill it in. Both the keystore and that file are
gitignored.
CI — add four repository secrets under Settings → Secrets and variables → Actions:
| Secret | Value |
|---|---|
SIGNING_KEYSTORE |
base64 of the .jks (see below) |
SIGNING_KEY_ALIAS |
the alias, e.g. hibana |
SIGNING_KEY_PASSWORD |
key password |
SIGNING_STORE_PASSWORD |
keystore password |
To produce the base64:
# Windows PowerShell — use an ABSOLUTE path. .NET resolves relative paths against
# the process working directory, which `cd` does not change, so a relative path
# here fails with a confusing "could not find file" pointing at some other folder.
[Convert]::ToBase64String([IO.File]::ReadAllBytes("C:\path\to\hibana-release.jks")) | Set-Clipboard
(Get-Clipboard).Length # sanity check: expect a few thousand characters# Linux
base64 -w0 hibana-release.jks
# macOS
base64 -i hibana-release.jksgit tag v0.2.0
git push --tagsrelease.yml then extracts the tag, builds a signed APK with versionName taken
from the tag, verifies the signature with apksigner, and publishes a GitHub
Release with the APK attached. The workflow fails loudly if the secrets are
missing rather than quietly producing an unsigned build.
| Workflow | Trigger | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
build.yml |
push, PR | Assemble, unit tests, lint; uploads the debug APK and reports |
release.yml |
v* tag |
Signed release APK, verified, attached to a GitHub Release |
- Separate Manga and Novel sections, with their own settings
- Import Manatan
.manatanbkbackups - AniList / MyAnimeList progress tracking
- Windows desktop build
- Anime support — a possible later phase of the wider project, out of scope here
Licensed under the Apache License 2.0 — see LICENSE and
NOTICE.
Apache 2.0 fits this project for three reasons: Mihon and IReader are both Apache 2.0, so the compatibility layers here sit comfortably alongside them; it grants patent rights explicitly, which bare MIT does not; and it requires attribution notices to be preserved, which matters because Hibana implements several upstream APIs and formats.
Hibana ships and hosts no content. It reads from sources supplied by third-party extensions that you choose to install; responsibility for what those extensions access rests with their operators and with you.
Hibana interoperates with formats and extension APIs from Mihon, IReader, LNReader, and Manatan. Those projects' extension ecosystems make this app useful; the compatibility layers here are written against their public APIs.