I use the Android applications.
Well, yeah, but which versions of the Android apps? Some devices are stuck on older versions because those devices are stuck on older flavors of Android.
Image quality is glaringly obvious to me on my 9 inch 1536p tablet's screen. Even more so is the sound quality.
The native resolution of current anime is higher than 720p more often than one might think, as well. 900p and 1080p are both common sights. And even with upscaling, the low bitrate and artefacting of a 720p stream tend to make the picture much less crisp and pleasant than that of a 1080p one. Even if it's downscaled to a 720p screen. Hell, especially then.
I'm sure the possibility exists that the app is limiting itself by how it perceives my connection, in which case I'd wish it to bloody well give me the manual choice instead, since I can watch 1080p video fine on other services over Wi-fi. As for the manga issues, they seem to have to do with how sloppily the application handles the storing of pre-loading data. Many seem to share the issue. (It's not like I got CR for manga anyway, so eh. I just won't use it.)
The lack of being able to set anything beyond high and low for manual settings is annoying. Though the more I look into it, the more I see that a lot of streaming is capped at 720p across many of their platforms, which makes me think it's either an infrastructure thing on their backend (plus issues getting CDN servers downstream, though this is less likely) or a licensing rights thing where companies don't want to give rights to Crunchyroll for anything that's better than native 720p or upscaled 1080p. Gotta move those BDs somehow, and smart Japanese consumers could save a ton of money by attempting to use VPNs to get access to overseas Crunchyroll streams if they got those rights. I suppose it could also be in how the apps are designed to render the video on the system end.
The manga app pre-loading issues have been around a while as it's probably not a high priority fix since they make dramatically less money off of that than off of anime. When those weren't happening it was certainly usable. Uninstall/reinstall was the longer-term fix.
You know, as I take a look at the Crunchyroll forums (granted, a bad idea to begin with) to read discussions on legitimate usability and quality issues, I find that threads are littered with responses using logic along the lines of "I personally don't mind inferior quality, ergo this is a non-issue", "at least you get to watch anime/it's better than nothing(!), so stop complaining", after which some CR representative dryly posts that there "are no current plans to change this", and that's the end of that.
You know, I think it's this that aggrevates me the most. That people defend the issues, as if someone's doing us a favour, rather than providing a premium service.
I suppose, if anything, it should be considered a success in a company's PR if they have managed to create that kind of view of themselves in the minds of its users. Fuck that, though.
Yes, I'm annoyed.
It is a niche service they're providing and one that is generally more convenient than trying to sail the high seas.
Their existence is also seen by some as bucking the "BIG EVIL MEDIA CONGLOMERATES" establishment. That Crunchyroll is one of the better services we have in general (not just in anime streaming; Netflix is clearly the leader in the field, but Crunchyroll could be argued to be in that next tier below it, having lower resolution content than Hulu but being dramatically cheaper for commercial free streaming, while also having a bigger library of content for the price-point than single-network services like HBOGo and CBS Now) speaks volumes about the plodding pace media companies took to get to this point. It also won't get better if they don't have the capital to improve.
