How We Review
Two different things get rated on this site, and they work differently. Apps get a reviewed verdict and an FMR score, which someone here earns by installing the app and paying for their own coins. Series get two content ratings, one of which we can only assign by watching the thing. This page sets out both, and says plainly where the limits are.
The FMR score, and the four things it measures
Every app we review gets a single score out of 10. It is not an average of star ratings from anywhere else and it is not a measure of library size. It answers four questions, in roughly this order of weight:
- Is the writing good across the catalogue, not just in the one viral hit? Every app has three or four series worth watching. The question is what happens when you finish those and go looking for a fifth.
- How much do you genuinely get free? Where the paywall lands, how many episodes precede it, and how much a patient viewer can unlock with daily bonus coins without spending anything.
- Does it respect your money? Coin pricing that maps to what episodes actually cost, no auto-renewing pass buried in a confirmation sheet, no upsell interrupt every fourth episode.
- Does it deliver what its genre promises? Production and translation quality, and whether a fantasy series can actually put a dragon on screen or has to cut away from one.
Library size informs the score and never decides it. The biggest library in the category also has among the earliest paywalls, and an app can lead on volume and still be the wrong install for you — which is why every ranking links through to the full write-up rather than asking you to trust the number.
Apps we have not reviewed say so
We cover 12 apps and have put 4 of them through a full review. The other 8 carry a researched page instead, and the difference is stated in their first paragraph rather than buried: no FMR score, no ranking position, and no claim about whether the writing is any good, because nobody here has watched it.
What a researched page does carry is everything that can be established without installing anything — the size, language mix and growth of the catalogue from our own crawl of the distributor’s library, and the app’s public record on the App Store: its rating, its publisher, and what its current reviewers report. Both are sources you can check yourself, which is the test we hold them to.
That second source turned out to matter more than we expected, so we now run it against the reviewed apps too. A headline star rating averages years of one-tap ratings and can stay high long after the experience has changed; reading what people are writing this month catches things a single account over a few weeks cannot. It corrected our own DramaBox review, which called that app’s auto-renew a set-a-reminder annoyance when its users describe something considerably harder to escape. The verdict is still ours and still leads the page. The store record sits underneath it, labelled as reported rather than reproduced.
Where the research says an app is not one we can recommend, the page says so and points to one we have reviewed. Both links earn us the same commission, which is exactly why there is no excuse for getting that call wrong.
This is deliberate and slightly costly: an unreviewed app is harder to write about and its page earns less. But a score we have not earned is the one thing that would make every other score on the site meaningless.
Two ratings on every series
Series carry a romance heat rating from 1 to 4 and a separate story rating on a G to Adult scale. They are independent on purpose, because they genuinely do not move together: a revenge thriller can carry our toughest story rating with barely a kiss in it, and a pure romance can be the steamiest thing on an app while being perfectly fine for a thirteen-year-old. Rating one axis and not the other mislabels both kinds of show. The full explanation of both scales covers what each level means and what earns it.
The letters on the story rating are the familiar ones because you already know roughly what they mean — but these are our assessments, not classifications anyone awarded. Short dramas are app content and no board rates them, so somebody has to, and we would rather it be someone who says out loud that they are doing it.
Reviewed ratings and provisional ones
We list 16,670 series and nobody could watch them all. So ratings come in two kinds and every surface on the site tells you which one you are looking at.
A reviewed rating means someone here watched the series and rated it, peak-first: plenty of shows open sweet and heat up thirty episodes in, so the rating reflects where the series gets to rather than where it starts. 5 titles carry one.
A provisional rating is derived from the platform’s own synopsis — signals in the description indicating violence, coercion or a betrayal plot — and 16,665 titles carry one. Provisional ratings deliberately round up. If a synopsis hints at anything dark it goes to R, and a synopsis with no signal at all still floors at PG-13 rather than dropping to PG. The two mistakes do not cost the same: over-rating a gentle romance costs you nothing, while under-rating a coercion plot puts someone somewhere they did not agree to go. Provisional titles carry no heat rating at all, because you cannot tell how steamy something is from a paragraph of marketing copy.
Where the numbers come from
The catalogue figures on this site — library sizes, language counts, how many titles an app added in the last thirty days — are measurements from our own crawl of the 118,640 series available across this network, not figures from anyone’s marketing. That is why they occasionally disagree with an app’s own claims, and why they move between refreshes. The most recent refresh was 12 September 2026.
We never publish an unverified fact about pricing or episode counts, and we never state an exact coin price. Coin economies change often enough that any figure would be stale within weeks, so we describe pricing shapes instead — free episodes daily, then coins or a weekly pass — which stay true.
How the money works, and what it does not touch
This site is reader-supported. When you tap a “Watch on” or “Try” button and go on to install or subscribe, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Every app we cover is monetised through the same affiliate programme at the same rate, which is the structural reason the rankings can be trusted: there is nothing to gain by moving anyone up. Rankings are decided before monetisation is looked at, and when we say skip something we mean it.
The full commercial detail is on the affiliate disclosure.
Who does the reviewing
One person. Every reviewed app on this site was installed, watched and paid for by Tess Harlow, who writes under that name for reasons set out on the about page. The researched pages are desk work by the same person from the sources named on each page. There is no team, no freelancer pool and no content agency, which is why the number of reviewed apps grows slowly and why every claim on the site can be traced to one pair of hands.
Corrections
Ratings get revised. A reviewed rating can move a provisional one in either direction once someone has actually watched the series, and an app’s score moves when the thing that earned it changes — a paywall moving earlier is a score change, not a footnote. Catalogue figures update with each refresh rather than being corrected individually.
If something here is wrong, it is worth telling us: a directory is only as good as the proportion of it that is still true.