NovelMaster scores 6.8 out of 10 — FAIR. It is a real reading app from Sungai Pte. Ltd. with genuine offline downloads and a clean reader. But its two store ratings point in opposite directions — 2.7 out of 5 on Google Play from roughly 4,200 reviews, 3.8 out of 5 from 2,639 ratings on the US App Store — and neither store will tell you how many books are actually on the shelf. Good content, awkward payment, unverifiable library.
The short version. Install it if you commute without signal and want a browsable shelf. Skip it if you are hunting one particular novel, because nobody publishes a catalogue size and you may simply not find it. If you only ever read on a stable connection, you are paying for a feature you will never use.
500,000+ novels — the largest catalogue claim in this category, stated by GoodNovel itself
Offline downloads — save chapters and read without a connection
NovelMaster is a web-novel reading app published by Sungai Pte. Ltd., a Singapore private-limited company registered at 15 Scotts Road. It is on both stores: Apple as Novel Master, listing id6446075788, filed under Book; Google Play as NovelMaster, package com.master.novel, filed under Books & Reference. Both listings were last updated on 26 August 2026 and both were checked by us on 3 September 2026.
Google Play reports more than 500,000 downloads. The app is free to install on both stores and carries in-app purchases. The feature list the developer publishes is short and, as far as we can tell, accurate: a large collection of short-form stories, a customisable reader, recommendations built from reading history, bookmarks, comments and ratings, and offline downloads.
One detail worth flagging because most reviews skip it: on the Play listing the developer declares that the app collects no data, shares only app info and performance with third parties, and does not encrypt data in transit. Deletion requests are supported. Take that as the developer's own declaration rather than as an audit result — Google does not verify these forms — but it is a claim you can hold them to.
This is the single most important thing to understand before installing, and it is an absence rather than a number. Neither store listing states how many novels NovelMaster carries, and the developer does not publish a figure anywhere we could find. You will see round numbers quoted around the web. We could not trace any of them to a source, so we are not repeating them.
Compare that with the category leader. GoodNovel states 500,000-plus titles directly in its own Google Play description — a marketing claim, certainly, but one the company has put its name to and can be held to. NovelMaster offers no equivalent. What browsing shows is a curated shelf: genre rails, editorial picks, a manageable set of titles rather than a search index over half a million books.
That matters most in precisely the situation you are probably in. You finished a drama, you have the title or at least the plot, and you want that book. On a curated shelf with no published size, the honest answer to "will my novel be there?" is that you have to search and find out. Do that first, before you invest an evening or a cent.
NovelMaster's ratings picture is contradictory and we are not going to smooth it over by averaging. Two figures exist, they measure different populations, and both were checked on 3 September 2026.
| Rating | Store | Sample | Who is rating | How to weigh it |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2.7 / 5 | Google Play, US storefront | About 4,200 reviews | Android users worldwide, aggregated into the US-facing listing | The larger sample and the worse score. If you are on Android, this is your number. |
| 3.8 / 5 | Apple App Store, US storefront | 2,639 ratings | US iPhone and iPad users rating in their own store | Mediocre rather than bad. If you are a US Apple user, this is your number. |
A gap of 1.1 points between two stores is unusual and it is not noise — both samples run into the thousands. We do not have visibility into why it exists. Plausible explanations include a different payment funnel on Android, a different acquisition mix, or simply that Apple's rating prompt reaches a different slice of users. What we can say is that averaging the two would produce a number that describes nobody.
The practical rule: look at the store you will actually install from, and ignore ours. Ratings are per-store, per-country and per-moment. Ours are a snapshot from one day in one storefront.
The two stores also disagree about who this app is for, and the gap is wide enough to matter if a teenager might get hold of the phone.
Apple rates the US listing 17+, and its own advisory text names frequent or intense sexual content or nudity, alongside infrequent mild horror themes and frequent intense mature or suggestive themes. Google Play rates the same app Teen, with the softer note that content is diverse and discretion is advised. Both were checked on 3 September 2026.
We are not going to adjudicate which store is right. We are going to point out that Apple's own advisory is the more specific of the two, and that if you are handing this app to anyone under seventeen, Apple's description is the one to read first.
Offline downloads are what NovelMaster does better than the drama apps it competes with for attention, and it is not close. You save chapters to the device and read them with no connection at all.
That is a structural advantage, not a feature-list tick. A ninety-second vertical video needs bandwidth every second it plays; a chapter of text is a few kilobytes that sits on the phone indefinitely. So the underground commute, the flight, the metered roaming plan, the rural dead zone — all of those are situations where a reading app works and a short drama app simply does not. If your reading happens in those gaps, this feature alone may outweigh everything else in this review.
NovelMaster is free to download on both stores and carries in-app purchases. Coin packs and subscription tiers exist and are visible on the in-app purchase screen.
We are deliberately not printing a price table. In-app purchase prices in this category vary by storefront, by country, by currency and by promotion, and they change often enough that a table published today misleads someone reading it in November. Anything we quoted would be a US snapshot presented as a fact about your wallet. Open the purchase screen in the app and read the actual prices in your own currency before you spend anything.
What we will say about the economics is structural, and it holds across this whole category. You are buying access chapter by chapter or in coin blocks, each individual purchase is small enough not to trigger a decision, and the total is what you should be watching. We wrote about the same mechanism on the video side in what to do when short drama apps get too expensive, and the arithmetic transfers directly.
We read through the 2026 reviews on both listings. The complaints cluster tightly, and they are worth knowing because they describe a moment you can plan around.
The dominant pattern: someone sees a clip of a story on TikTok or Facebook, installs the app to finish it, reads to where the clip stopped, and hits a paywall. Reviewers describe paying and then feeling the price was out of proportion to what unlocked. One recurring, specific complaint is difficulty locating the subscription cancellation control — worth noting that the only cancellation that actually stops billing happens in your Apple or Google account settings, not inside the app, and that uninstalling cancels nothing.
A second cluster is technical: reported chapter-skipping after purchase, and interface controls conflicting with Android system gestures on some devices. The developer's most recent release notes explicitly address an issue where some users could not access purchased content after paying, which suggests the reports were real and were fixed.
Against that, the praise is consistent and specific: people like the writing, the reader, and the fact that downloads genuinely work offline. This is not an app people find worthless. It is an app people find expensive.
None of this is fraud, and we do not use that word here. Billing runs through Apple and Google, the app is real, the chapters arrive when you pay. It is the same shape we documented across the video side of this category in are short drama apps a scam: legitimate service, aggressive funnel, angry reviews.
GoodNovel is the stronger default for most readers, and mainly on one axis: you can find things there. It states 500,000-plus titles in its own store description, holds 4.6 out of 5 on Google Play from roughly 974,000 reviews, carries Editors' Choice status and has passed ten million downloads. GoodNovel is not clean either — its Trustpilot profile sits at 1.5 out of 5 from about 87 reviews, and its coin pricing is the subject of our main criticism in that review.
| NovelMaster | GoodNovel | |
|---|---|---|
| Published catalogue size | None stated by either store or the developer | 500,000+ (stated in its own Play description) |
| Google Play rating | 2.7 / 5 from about 4,200 reviews | 4.6 / 5 from about 974,000 reviews |
| Google Play downloads | 500K+ | 10M+ |
| Apple US rating | 3.8 / 5 from 2,639 ratings | Not verified for this review |
| Editors' Choice | No | Yes |
| Third-party review site | No substantial profile found | 1.5 / 5 on Trustpilot from about 87 reviews |
| Apple age rating | 17+ (frequent/intense sexual content or nudity) | Not verified for this review |
| Offline downloads | Yes — the headline feature | Yes |
| Our score | 6.8 / 10 — FAIR | 8.6 / 10 — GREAT |
The honest summary: GoodNovel is where you go to find a specific book. NovelMaster is where you might go if you want a smaller shelf to browse and you read in places with no signal.
Our method is described in full on How we test. We install, read until the free chapters run out, look at what the paywall asks for, and check every number against a source we can name.
What earns the score. Offline downloads that genuinely work, and that no video app in this space can match. A clean, customisable reader. Writing that reviewers consistently praise even while complaining about the price. A real publisher with a registered address, not an anonymous shell.
What holds it down. A 2.7 out of 5 Google Play rating drawn from roughly 4,200 reviews — that is a large sample and it cannot be dismissed as a handful of angry users. A catalogue that neither store will size, which makes the "will my book be there" question unanswerable in advance. And reported payment friction concentrated at the cliffhanger, the exact point where judgement is weakest.
6.8 out of 10, FAIR. That means: real product, real use case, real reasons to be careful. It is not a recommendation to avoid, and it is not a recommendation to install without checking the two things below first.
Everything here costs nothing and takes about a quarter of an hour.
| Do this | Why | Walk away if |
|---|---|---|
| Search your specific title first | With no published catalogue size, this is the only way to answer the question that matters | It is not there, or only a similarly named title by a different author appears |
| Read the free chapters to where they stop | Tells you whether the writing is worth paying for before the paywall arrives | The free run ends before you have any sense of the book |
| Download a chapter and switch to airplane mode | Offline reading is the main reason to choose this app — verify it works on your device | The downloaded chapter will not open without a connection |
| Open your own store page and read the rating there | Ratings are per-store and per-country; our two figures are US snapshots | Your storefront shows a materially worse score than either figure here |
| Read the in-app purchase screen in your own currency | Prices vary by country and promotion; the number you see is the only one that applies to you | The cheapest meaningful pack costs more than you would spend on a paperback |
| If you subscribe, set a calendar reminder one day before renewal | Store-level cancellation is the only cancellation that counts; uninstalling does not cancel | You cannot locate the subscription in your Apple or Google account settings at all |
For some readers, under some conditions. We score it 6.8 out of 10. It earns that for genuine offline downloads, a clean reader and writing that reviewers on both stores praise. It loses points for a 2.7 out of 5 Google Play rating drawn from roughly 4,200 reviews, for a catalogue neither store will put a number on, and for reported friction when the free chapters run out mid-story.
Two different numbers, because the two stores disagree. Google Play shows 2.7 out of 5 from roughly 4,200 reviews. The US App Store shows 3.8 out of 5 from 2,639 ratings. Both were checked on 3 September 2026. Neither is an average of the other, and we do not blend them: look at the store you will actually install from.
Nobody outside the company knows, and we are not going to invent a number. Neither the App Store nor the Google Play listing states a catalogue size, and the developer does not publish one. What browsing shows is a curated shelf rather than a search index. GoodNovel, by contrast, states 500,000-plus titles in its own Google Play description, which is a claim you can at least point at.
Yes, and it is the app's strongest feature. You download chapters to the device and read them with no connection, which makes it usable on a plane, on an underground commute or on a metered data plan. Short drama apps mostly cannot do this, because video streaming needs bandwidth that a text file simply does not.
It is free to download on both stores and carries in-app purchases. Prices, coin values and subscription tiers vary by country and change with promotions, so we are not quoting a price list we cannot stand behind for your storefront. Open the purchase screen in the app and read the actual prices in your own currency before you spend anything.
The two stores disagree here as well, and the gap is worth knowing about before you hand a phone to a teenager. Apple rates the US listing 17-plus, citing frequent or intense sexual content or nudity. Google Play rates it Teen, with a note that content is diverse and discretion is advised. Both were checked on 3 September 2026.
GoodNovel is the stronger default for most readers. It states 500,000-plus titles in its own store description, holds 4.6 out of 5 on Google Play from roughly 974,000 reviews, carries Editors' Choice status and has passed 10 million downloads. It is not clean either: its Trustpilot profile sits at 1.5 out of 5 from about 87 reviews. NovelMaster wins on offline reading and on being small enough to browse.
Very often, yes. Short dramas are overwhelmingly adapted from web novels. ReelShort skews toward existing web-novel adaptations and GoodShort features them too, and the genre set is identical on both sides: billionaire and CEO romance, werewolf, mafia, revenge, hidden identity. That is why finishing a drama so often sends people to a reading app.
No, and we would not use that word. It is a real app from a named Singapore publisher, distributed through the official Apple and Google stores, with billing handled by those stores. The documented problems are a weak Google Play rating, an unstated catalogue size and reported payment friction. Those are reasons to be careful with your money, not allegations of fraud.
Three groups. Anyone chasing one particular novel, because there is no published catalogue size and no guarantee your title is on the shelf. Anyone who reads only on a stable connection, since the headline feature is wasted. And anyone who knows they will pay on impulse at a cliffhanger, because the reported complaints cluster at exactly that moment in the funnel.