Otaku! my new iOS app to easily search Japanese online stores

Video Games
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Otaku! my new iOS app enables you to easily search for the same thing across Japanese shopping websites: Yahoo Auctions, Mercari, Fril, Buyee, FromJapan, HOYOYO…

Set the search term once then each site shows you search results—feels like magic!

Try it https://testflight.apple.com/join/kaGUJT9f

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Good work on the app. Very useful for non Japanes speakers when it comes to finding stuff. Also saves a lot of time.

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Cheers!

I’m interested in your thoughts about what could be done to make it useful for Japanese people, other than the obvious localisation of text. What do you think?

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Whoa! I saw Time Extension retweeted this on X today and I bookmarked. Cool to see you’re the creator. I want to buy some more Famicom games for my NES/FC collection lately so looking forward to trying this out.

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I totally missed that they had retweeted it! Cool.

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Cool I’ll check it out, I have a bunch of searched I do on various sites.

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Let me know if any sites you use are missing. Gotta catch’em all.

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I don’t know mate.
I can’t see the app myself as I’m AN android user so I’m not sure of all the features.

For the Japanese market, listing where the item is would be attractive. And if they can pay using PayPay or not.

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Android is on my list, we’ll see.

This is just a custom browser, wrapping all the websites which operate as they usually do for ordering, payment, shipping etc.

So the USPs of this app:

  • automatic searching of same term across all sites
  • all sites in one place, keep your browser clean, no need to use multiple apps
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Amazing! I remember you said before you had some means of collating this before, but it wasn’t necessarily user friendly. Looking forward to giving this a whirl.

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This is totally different than my RSS feeds of searches. But I’m thinking how I might be able to combine the two.

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I used the app, but I cannot change to the english version of sites like suruga-ya? Am I missing something?

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That’s a good point.

I’ll add USA/World Suruga-ya (I can’t use that in the UK I don’t think) and look into adding ability to translate pages. Let me know if there are other sites you can’t get into English.

Some of the sites auto-translate but I’ll have a look at adding system or browser translate.

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I was surprised that Amazon did not show me the English version of the Japanese site. I have ordered direct from there in the past for the Sega Astro City Minis. That might be one to check.

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Mysterious! It does display in English for me. :upside_down_face:

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I’ve pushed the latest build where I specify

  • Amazon Japan
  • Suruga-ya Japan
  • Suruga-ya World
  • etc

A note that some sites only display in Japanese.
Some small improvements.

Going to test and fix any iOS 18 issues this week and launch by month end.

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Added translation for sites that don’t offer it. Build 240916.

Thanks for the motivation!

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No crashes for a while now, it seems to have been when people were force-quitting the app by swiping it up on the iOS multi-tasking interface.

A few things on my to do list, when I have a bit more time. Meanwhile I’m really enjoying using it every day.