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Fiction app Serial Box is now available on Android

Fiction app Serial Box is now available on Android

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The company just announced a new partnership with Marvel, and it raised $4.5 million in seed funding

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Image: Serial Box

Since its launch, fiction startup Serial Box has existed as a desktop and iOS app. Yesterday, the company rolled out a long-awaited Android app, bringing its growing library of stories to a new platform.

The rollout comes after the company made a couple of big announcements: it’s partnering with Marvel to produce a new family of serials about Black Panther, Black Widow, Jessica Jones, and Thor, and it also announced that it had raised an additional $4.5 million in seed funding. Taken together, those things show that the company is growing, and bringing in users on the platform will allow it to continue to grow its user base.

A beta version of the Android app was available, but this is, at last, the final version. The iOS app is also one of the better reading apps out there, and the Android app carries over the same features, including a storefront where you can subscribe to each Serial story and the ability to switch between reading and listening to each story seamlessly. After signing in, existing users’ libraries will automatically sync to the app.

Serial Box CEO and co-founder Molly Barton described the company’s approach to publishing as “retooling reading for the smartphone age.” It doesn’t publish novels; rather, it releases what it calls “Serials,” which are longform stories that take more of a cue from a season of television than a traditional novel. Each Serial is broken into 10 to 15 individual installments that each tell a largely standalone story. Taken together, they play out a larger story arc over the course of the series, and, in some cases, they continue with multiple seasons.

Since it launched, the company has released a number of interesting stories such as Witch Who Came In From The Cold, a Cold War-set espionage thriller about two magical factions; The Vela, a recently released space opera about a mercenary tracking down a refugee ship; and Ninth Step Station, a murder mystery set in a near-future Tokyo.