Mixi’s Nohana photobook service now available on Android

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Over the past year Japan’s Mixi has offered up a few interesting services coming from its innovation team, including its mobile photobook printing service Nohana. I’ve used the service a few times, and the books always turn out well [1]. And now the service, which initially launched on iOS back in February, is available for Android.

Nohana lets you upload photos from your smartphone, creating a photobook which is then printed and sent to your doorstep. Or if you prefer, it could be sent another family member far away, like a grandparent for example. Users get to print one booklet (of 20 pictures) each month for free, paying a minimal shipping fee of 90 yen (almost a dollar). Subsequent orders cost 500 yen.

According to Gamebiz.jp, over 40,000 users have uploaded more than 1.3 million photos to date, publishing 46,000 photobooks. And reportedly 12,000 people pre-registered for the Android app, which is certainly promising.

The Android app went online quietly late last week, and is gradually climbing the photo app charts. It will be interesting to see if Nohana can afford to keep offering one free book per month if it becomes more popular later. But for now, I think it’s still under the radar, so if you’re in Japan and you take lots of smartphone photos, it’s a pretty sweet deal and I recommend trying it out.

For now it appears as if the company is trying to grow a very targeted user base, even reaching out to local kindergarden schools back in May to promote its services, donating some Nohana credit to selected schools who can then use it to order books.


  1. As long as your photos are of a decent quality, your books will be about as good.  ↩