I know Tachiyomi (and associated forks) are a popular way to browse and read manga within the community (myself included). This change means that the Tachiyomi app will no longer include access to installation of all but a select few extensions. Specifically, the only extensions allowed going forward are the “bring-your-own” services. You can see the new extension list here.
Based on some of my searching, this change seems to be in response to the threat of legal action by Kakao Entertainment (a Korean webtoon company). Tachiyomi had recently removed a couple extensions from their app (mangadex being one of them), but this change is sweeping.
Going forward, if you have extensions currently installed on your device, they are going to stay there, but will no longer be maintained. So, if something breaks for the service it is communicating with, then the whole thing breaks.
The latest version of Tachiyomi added the ability to add external extension repositories. So, this enables the option of other groups maintaining extensions in the place of the Tachiyomi devs.
Edit: For more context, there are two relevant discussions on the [email protected] community. One about the mangadex extension specifically, and the other about this latest move.
For those that primarily used the Mangadex extension: Neko was (before yesterday) an endorsed fork that specifically used Mangadex, AFAIK without using the extensions repo. So if you’re like me and had the majority of manga using the Mangadex extension, that’s worth checking out. Seems like the Tachiyomi devs removed Neko from their endorsed forks section yesterday too. Presumably due to similar reason for removing all extensions.
The UI is quite different (I think based on another Tachiyomi fork), but it’s the same under the hood. That means you can simply restore from your Tachiyomi backup, so migration is easy.
This looks promising actually if it can restore from a tachiyomi backup. A killer feature I saw glancing over it was this:
I can’t tell you how many times I have been bingeing a series and have to rapidly flip through the terrible mtl chapters to get to the good human tl’d chapters. I just checked and 238/260 series in my tachiyomi are from mangadex, so I am going to give this one a try when I get a chance.