Anime

let you know when new episodes are out

displaying English titles

ability to rank series (did you mean rate series?)

anilist.co has you covered, the mobile site is decent unless you really really need an app. If by ranking you mean like a 1st, 2nd, 3rd system that's independent of score, then I guess you could use the custom notes fields or custom lists?

When MAL started to enshittify years ago, I moved over to Kitsu. It was easy because of the import option. I use Kitsune from F-Droid with it and it's been a delight.

@thejoker954 there are better platforms, but due to laziness and the functions i need still working...

trakt.tv
myanimelist

I‘m using trakt.tv

For anime, regular shows and movies.

Gives notifications when a new episode airs.

I use MAL-Sync to help extend the function of MAL, but for episode release tracking nothing beats RSS feeds.

Crunchyroll still provides an episode release feed. I selfhost RSSHub to pull data from other websites.

I'm using AL-chan, which is a frontend for anilist.co. Of course, there are various other frontends available, including just using anilist itself directly.

My biggest gripe is it doesn’t let you know when new episodes are out for anime you’re watching

AL-chan does this. It can also notify you when new seasons of shows you've seen have been annouced.

I also don’t like the numbering system for watched episodes - it starts at zero instead of one so it shows the last episode you watched vs the next episode you should be watching.( It’s relatively minor I know but that’s how I prefer my show tracking)

I'm guessing you'll have a hard time finding an app that displays the number of episodes you've seen +1 instead of just showing the number of episodes you've seen. As far as I know, AL-chan can't be configured to do this.

Features it does have that I need are displaying English titles

This is configurable

the ability to rank series (even if it’s just locally).

No problems there either

I am self-hosting yamtrack which integrates with jellyfin (amongst others).I'm also hosting my which will send yamtrack notifications (like new releases) to my phone.

Its a little like myanimelist except for everything: anime, movies, series, etc.

Probably not what you're after OP, but here's what I do to remember where I left off watching things.

I use a plain text file called watch.txt that I stuck in my home directory. I jot down the name of whatever I was watching, the date, context about the disc/season/episode number, plus the timestamp I stopped at or "done" if I stopped at the end of an episode/disc.

e.g. here's a snippet from it:

  Evangelion  2026-07-20  Disc 4  29:25
  To Love Ru  2026-06-16  Disc 2  E14 done
  Konosuba    2026-06-27  S2      E01 done

Nothing fancy, but it works for me.

I use the streaming services' built in tracking to keep track of what episode I'm on. I use animeschedule.net for following weekly releases of airing shows. I use MAL to record when I start watching, stopped watching, rating, and tracking "plan to watch".

Watching Crunchyroll's releases through Grayjay, if I follow a series as I would subscribe to an Youtube channel (they're treated as the same by Grayjay), they appear in the subscriptions and can be hidden by toggling off the default filter "watched". Also, you can generate a playlist of a series' episodes, and remove each episode as you watch them.

Grayjay's Crunchyroll integration only works if you log in to Crunchyroll and have access to the episodes, though.

Anihyou - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.axiel7.anihyou

https://github.com/axiel7/AniHyou-android

I used to use My anime list until some moderator removed a review of mine. Thats when I removed my entire account there and created my own MAL just for me on my own website. Its very handy to keep track of what I watched plus I think people enjoy reading my reviews. (not sure, I don't interact much)

Physical notes?📑

I just use Plex. It shows me the next episode on the top. If I stop watching for (I think) 60 days, it drops off Now Playing, but it still remembers if I go back to it, jumping automatically to the next episode.

If you're on Android, I used to like SeriesGuide. I haven't used it in over a decade, though, but it came up in conversation and I looked it up, and it still exists. Hasn't been ported to iOS yet, though, but IIRC it was completely offline.

The MAL stuff is hit or miss because MAL itself is hit or miss.

When you get into online stuff, you tend to run into online problems. Like I know some Sword Art Online fans want the fourth season merged in with the third season. They don't dislike the fourth season, they just don't think it should be called the fourth season. They hashed this out on The TVDB, the site that all these other sites pull from, and they lost. Then you have issues like with Bungo Stray Dogs where the first two seasons are put together for some reason — so they're not always right. But, if you use an online service, you kinda gotta play by their rules, so if those rules become an issue... well... their way or the highway.

You could always just use a note in your phone. I have this app called Hindsight that is kind of a habit tracker. Just for fun, whenever I watch a movie, or finish a video game, or finish a show/season, I log it there. It's not connected to any metadata provider, it's just a dumb app that tracks how many times you do something. This is on iOS, but there are tons of these habit tracker apps out there. You can even vibe code them — I don't endorse vibe coding, but I fell for one first. Apparently whatever AI made them the app couldn't figure out things like dark mode or other stuff people were requesting and finally they just admitted they vibe coded the thing to make some money. So that is an option, I suppose.