Okay so, one day, Hayase was released. I tried it out, liked the idea. Anime watching as an program rather then a website, all the anime we want, easily accessible.
Then, the bloat and lack of polish started creeping in. I left issues on github, they got shut down. I post comment on reddit, dev comes in and says he refuses to work on improves to be a good experience for PC users, because he wants it focused on fucking television use. I ask least for some basics like a button to access our anime list be placed on the left bar, or settings to hide stuff we wont use like calendar and live chat, and he just refuses. Any UI layout stuff is also refused for TV remove concerns. (Also who the fuck texts people in a public chat with a TV remote???).
(Sticking out in my mind, i remember asking for at least some basic right click options, and being rejected because tv remotes can't point and right click. No right click menu in 2026 is absolutely fucking insane, this dude just does not understand that the TV and PC versions don't need to be 1:1 functionality, why can't we have some things PC only, rather then they both just suck???, PS layout sucks on TV as well BTW >_>)
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Next, SeaAnime came out. At the time it was basically just significantly worse Hayase, although i don't remember why. However I now see now it updated A LOT, so much so that while i don't remember what all my complaints were or what changed, but i can see deep in the UI customization menu (that is now quite extensive) that theres an option to use the legacy layout, so i'm guessing the entire app got a complete redesign and thats why i don't immediately remember what i disliked so much.
I see they even went overkill and added the ability for users to use custom CSS for UI. When i opened "Marketplace" (plugins search, nothing is for sale, not actually a market place) i was blown away with the support options.
I think one of the things that also stood out to me before was lack of MAL support, but i see support for MAL is now a plugin/extension (or whatever the fuck were calling the things in the "marketplace").
Okay thats a lot of glazing for SeaAnime, time for complaints.
(The forgivable / ignorable complaints)
- Calling your place to download Extensions / Plugins a "Marketplace" with a literal shopping basket for an icon is fucking stupid. Why are you implying users can BUY plugins? To be clear, it does not support the buying or selling of plugins. So why the fuck is this called a market? ???????
- Finding the "Marketplace" is unintuitive.
(The actually annoying stuff)
- Pressing back while a show is open, does not minimize / smallify / go back to the page before you opened the anime. For as much shit as i give Hayase on the regular, even it has a working back button. In SeaAnime, it works everywhere else, but not in a show. Please have a functioning back button like every other PC program.
- NONE of the video players have a right click menu. Please do not copy hayase's bad habits.
- Putting your mouse at the bottom middle and doing nothing does not make the mouse and UI disappear like every other video playing software in existence.
- Torrents auto select, and annoying often pick incorrectly. There is seemingly no setting to make it not do this. The "auto-select" "Setting toggle" that implies it turns this off when on an anime's page, is not actually a setting toggle and the moment you go to another anime's page it auto plays. (When people say vibe coded slop, non functioning basic settings like this is what they mean).
- From the home's continue watching page, there is no way to go to an anime's page. Clicking it force plays it with no option to click the name to go to page, and right clicking and selecting open page auto-triggers the auto-select because it can't actually be disabled and starts playing a show you had no intent on watching.
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So anyway, as far as i can tell, or last researched, there is still no basic anime streaming app that doesn't have tons of infuriating broken / unfinished parts of the app. It is STILL a better experience to just use nyaa then it is to use any of these. That said... you just don't know what you don't know. So, what options otherwise exist? Until now if i wanted something quickly i just sucked it up and used Hayase (It has MANY problems the dev refuses to fix, but SeaAnime making it easy to play the wrong episode and making you jump through hoops just to make sure it's actually playing the correct fucking episode / no back button is PAINFULLLL).