What Is MoboReels? A Smaller Short Drama App From MoboReader's Publisher, Now Posting Hour-Long Uploads
MoboReels is a vertical short drama app sold by the company behind the MoboReader novel app. It has 40,607 US App Store ratings and a 17+ rating, and its YouTube channel has moved to hour-long uploads.
MoboReels is a short drama app: serialised stories filmed in vertical format for phones, released in very short episodes. It is one of the smaller apps in the category, it comes from the publisher of a novel-reading app, and its YouTube channel has recently changed what it posts.
Everything below comes from two public sources we read on 9 October 2026: the US App Store listing, and every public upload on MoboReels’ official YouTube channel.
Who makes it
On the US App Store, MoboReels has been available since 12 July 2023. The seller listed is Changdu (HK) Technology Limited. That is the same seller as MoboReader, a novel and web-fiction reading app that has been on the store since 2017. The shared name is not a coincidence of branding: the two apps come from the same company.
MoboReels is not the only short drama app with a reading app behind it. On the same store, GoodShort is sold by the same company as the GoodNovel fiction app.
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 | 872,309 | 4.8 | 17+ | 16 |
| GoodShort | 529,311 | 4.9 | 12+ | 14 |
| ReelShort | 506,699 | 4.7 | 12+ | 21 |
| NetShort | 219,887 | 4.7 | 12+ | 17 |
| ShortMax | 177,874 | 4.6 | 17+ | 19 |
| MoboReels | 40,607 | 4.5 | 17+ | 1 |
| FlexTV | 7,440 | 4.5 | 12+ | 15 |
Two things stand out:
- MoboReels has about a twentieth of DramaBox’s ratings. Of the seven apps, only FlexTV has fewer.
- It lists one language, English, where every other app lists between 14 and 21. This is the language of the app’s interface, not of its shows, but it suggests MoboReels is built for English-speaking viewers rather than a global audience.
Its 17+ rating puts it with DramaBox and ShortMax; the other four are rated 12+.
What its YouTube channel posts
MoboReels’ official channel is @moboreelsshorts, named “MoboReels - Daily Short Dramas”. It opened on 24 April 2024, YouTube shows it with about 575,000 subscribers, and it has 1,635 public uploads. Every upload we checked is in portrait format.
The channel has changed shape steadily:
| Period | Uploads | Median length | Over 50 minutes | Median views |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apr to Dec 2024 | 527 | 1 min 54 s | 0 | 8,228 |
| Jan to Jun 2025 | 480 | 9 min 47 s | 7 | 8,322 |
| Jul to Dec 2025 | 296 | 22 min 31 s | 41 | 4,158 |
| Jan to Aug 2026 | 306 | 18 min 20 s | 59 | 1,616 |
| Sep to 9 Oct 2026 | 26 | 1 h 03 min | 15 | 1,280 |
It began by posting single numbered episodes: 550 uploads between April 2024 and March 2025 carry an episode number, at a median of about two minutes each. Through 2025 the uploads grew into longer runs of the story. Since September 2026, 15 of its 26 uploads run longer than 50 minutes, and 13 of those are tagged [Full] or [Binge Watch]. The longest upload on the channel runs 4 hours 35 minutes.
The channel name says “daily”, and in 2026 it has come close: 332 uploads on 226 of the year’s first 282 days. But uploads have thinned, from 527 in the last nine months of 2024 to 306 in the first eight months of 2026, and views have fallen faster. The typical recent upload has about 1,300 views, against more than 8,000 for those from two years ago. Newer uploads have had less time to collect views, so part of that drop is simply age.
What this means if you want to watch
- For a whole MoboReels story on YouTube, look at the recent uploads. The channel has posted 122 uploads longer than 50 minutes, almost all since mid-2025, and the newest are tagged
[Full]or[Binge Watch]. Expect an hour or more. - The older uploads are fragments. The 2024 material is single two-minute episodes, so you would need dozens of uploads to follow one series.
- If you have seen a MoboReels clip and want the name, the Clip Finder searches the official channels’ titles, MoboReels included.
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 MoboReels, how it sits against six larger apps on the US App Store, and what its official channel has posted, upload by upload.
It does not show how many series MoboReels has, or what is inside the app. Unlike ReelShort, NetShort and ShortMax, MoboReels publishes no catalogue we can read, so we cannot say how many series it carries or whether its long uploads contain every episode. Ratings counts are not user counts, and they mix very old and very recent ratings. Nothing on this page describes what anything costs.
What we measured
The US App Store listings of MoboReels, MoboReader and six other short drama apps, read through Apple’s public search service on 9 October 2026: seller, release date, rating count, average rating, age rating and listed languages. Every public upload on MoboReels’ official YouTube channel, 1,635 videos from April 2024 to October 2026, read through the YouTube Data API on 9 October 2026: title, upload date, length and view count. Frame shape comes from the 504 uploads we checked on 7 October 2026.