What Is DramaWave? A 2024 Short Drama App With 184,000 Ratings, From a Seller That Runs Two Other Short Drama Apps
DramaWave is a vertical short drama app on the US App Store since September 2024, sold by Skywork AI Pte Ltd, which also sells the DramaReels and HotDrama apps. It has 183,650 US ratings, and its YouTube channel had its busiest month ever in September 2026.
DramaWave is a short drama app: serialised stories filmed in vertical format for phones, released in very short episodes. It arrived in September 2024, it already has more US App Store ratings than one app a year older, the company that sells it runs two other short drama apps, and its YouTube channel had its busiest month ever in September 2026.
Everything below comes from public sources we read on 10 October 2026: the US App Store listings of DramaWave and of every other app from the same seller, DramaWave’s Google Play listing and website, and every public upload we could list on its official YouTube channel.
Who makes it
On the US App Store, DramaWave has been available since 23 September 2024. The seller listed is Skywork AI Pte Ltd.
That seller has 16 apps on the US store, and three of them are short drama apps:
| App | On the US store since | US App Store ratings |
|---|---|---|
| DramaWave | 23 Sep 2024 | 183,650 |
| DramaReels | 10 Dec 2024 | 39,730 |
| HotDrama | 22 Apr 2026 | 1,396 |
The other 13 are a long way from short drama. By Apple’s own categories, twelve of them are seven games, four music apps and a productivity tool; the thirteenth is GameWave, which describes itself as an AI game community. The oldest is the StarMaker karaoke app, on the store since 2010.
That is a different shape from the other apps we have looked at. MoboReels and GoodShort are each sold by a company that also publishes a novel-reading app. FlickReels’ seller has only one other app, also a short drama app. DramaWave comes from a company with a broad catalogue of games and entertainment apps, which runs several short drama brands side by side.
What we cannot tell you is whether DramaWave, DramaReels and HotDrama share a catalogue. None of them publishes a list of series we can read.
How it compares with the bigger apps
The App Store does not publish download numbers, but it does show how many people have rated each app. That is a rough sign of reach, not a user count:
| App | US App Store ratings | Average | Age rating | Languages listed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| DramaBox | 872,446 | 4.8 | 17+ | 16 |
| GoodShort | 529,384 | 4.9 | 12+ | 14 |
| ReelShort | 506,767 | 4.7 | 12+ | 21 |
| NetShort | 220,079 | 4.7 | 12+ | 17 |
| DramaWave | 183,650 | 4.9 | 12+ | 24 |
| ShortMax | 177,892 | 4.6 | 17+ | 19 |
| FlickReels | 106,119 | 4.8 | 12+ | 16 |
| MoboReels | 40,609 | 4.5 | 17+ | 1 |
| FlexTV | 7,440 | 4.5 | 12+ | 15 |
Two things stand out:
- DramaWave has slightly more ratings than ShortMax, which reached the store a year earlier. It still has about a fifth of DramaBox’s.
- It lists 24 interface languages, more than any other app here. ReelShort is next with 21.
DramaWave’s description says it offers more than 30,000 dramas across 18 languages. That is the app’s own figure, and we have no way to check it: DramaWave publishes no catalogue we can count. The 18 refers to the dramas, the App Store’s 24 to the app’s interface, so the two numbers are not measuring the same thing.
What its YouTube channel posts
DramaWave’s official channel is @dramawaveapp, named “DramaWave - Dramas & Reels”, the same name as the app. Neither the App Store listing nor the website links to it, so we checked the other direction: the channel’s description carries a download link, and that link opens DramaWave’s own App Store page on an iPhone and its Google Play page on Android.
The channel opened on 10 October 2024, YouTube shows it with about 6.71 million subscribers, and we could list 2,573 public uploads, from 13 November 2024 to 10 October 2026:
| Period | Uploads | Median length | Over 50 minutes | Median views |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nov to Dec 2024 | 53 | 5 min 01 s | 0 | 11,688 |
| Jan to Jun 2025 | 256 | 9 min 26 s | 0 | 13,991 |
| Jul to Dec 2025 | 676 | 12 min 45 s | 5 | 8,454 |
| Jan to May 2026 | 867 | 14 min 02 s | 11 | 7,095 |
| Jun to Sep 2026 | 641 | 1 min 21 s | 0 | 9,611 |
| 1 to 10 Oct 2026 | 80 | 14 min 27 s | 0 | 5,155 |
Unlike FlickReels, whose uploads are mostly numbered episodes, this channel rarely posts them: only 113 of the 2,573 uploads, about 4%, carry an episode number. For most of its life the typical upload has been a cut of a single series, and those cuts grew from five minutes in late 2024 to about 14 minutes in early 2026. From June to September 2026 the channel switched to short clips, 465 of 641 under three minutes. In October it went back to longer cuts.
Its output has risen too: 295 uploads in September 2026, its busiest month, and uploads on 235 of the first 283 days of 2026. In September and October, FlickReels’ channel posted nothing at all.
Sixteen uploads run longer than 50 minutes, the first in July 2025. One, from August 2025, is listed at more than 19 hours; the next longest runs 2 hours 28 minutes. YouTube’s own counter shows 3,435 videos for the channel, more than the 2,573 we could list; we cannot account for the difference.
Three more channels, in Portuguese, Spanish and Indonesian, carry the same download links. We have not counted them here.
What this means if you want to watch
- DramaWave is a mid-sized app by ratings, between NetShort and ShortMax on the US store.
- On YouTube, expect cuts rather than whole series. Two in three uploads run under a quarter of an hour, the typical one about ten minutes, and only 16 in the channel’s history are longer than 50 minutes.
- DramaReels and HotDrama come from the same seller. If you are comparing apps, they are not independent options, though we cannot say how much their libraries overlap.
- Our Clip Finder does not cover this channel. It searches the official channels it was built on, and DramaWave is not one of them.
If you are choosing between apps rather than looking at this one, which short drama app to use compares what the larger apps publish.
What this does and does not show
It shows who sells DramaWave, what else that seller publishes, how DramaWave sits against eight other short drama apps on the US App Store, and what its official channel has posted, upload by upload.
It does not show what is inside the app. We cannot check the 30,000-drama claim, say how many series are in English, or say whether the three sister apps carry the same shows. Ratings counts are not user counts, and they mix old and recent ratings. We could not open the App Store’s own web page from our location, so the listing details come from Apple’s public lookup service. Nothing on this page describes what anything costs.
What we measured
The US App Store listings of DramaWave, the 15 other apps from the same seller and eight other short drama apps, read through Apple’s public lookup service on 10 October 2026: seller, release date, category, rating count, average rating, age rating, listed languages and description. DramaWave’s Google Play description and its official website, including the site’s front-end code, read the same day. Every public upload we could list on DramaWave’s official YouTube channel, 2,573 videos from November 2024 to October 2026 (two scheduled live-stream placeholders with no video are left out), read through the YouTube Data API on 10 October 2026: title, upload date, length and view count. The channel’s download link was followed on 10 October 2026 to confirm where it leads. The FlickReels comparison uses that channel’s uploads, read the same day.