I discovered Anki 12 years ago while living in Japan. I was trying my hardest and absolutely failing to remember any of the Japanese I was studying. Maybe I was due for a learning-style renaissance for myself and Anki was just the catalyst, but it really made a positive impact on my life. More than just memorizing kanji on AnkiDroid during my commute, I just started to believe I could learn anything. I was starting to take my coding hobby more seriously at the time and hacking on Anki was a big part of that too. Thanks for all the hard work Damien and David Allison. I'm so grateful for the software you've worked on.
Agreed, Anki has really helped me with learning new languages. The creation of cards was always a slog though, so recently I've been playing with an Anki MCP server hooked up to Claude. I can dump my iTalki lessons in, or ask Claude to make cards based on a song I've been listening to, etc and get a bunch of relevant cards generated for me. It's honestly been kind of magic.
The MCP approach is brilliant! I've been solving the same friction problem from a different angle. I mostly use Anki to improve my vocabulary, and ended up building a tiny browser-side tool for myself (now called Wordwise / Anki Dictionary) that lets me double click any word on a webpage, get a clean definition + the sentence it appears in, and export it straight into Anki with one click.
It’s been a surprisingly good middle ground between fully manual cards and fully LLM dumps. If anyone’s curious: https://wordwise.me
Yeah, llms change the game for card creation. I'm trying to learn Rust (programming language) and I have Codex ingesting books/articles and generating sensible cards from them. It's able to consistently get the HTML right for syntax highlighting in examples too.
Same for me. I was doing my PhD in another country and was just overwhelmed and disoriented at the sheer scale of information I suddenly had to remember and digest. Anki was on again/off again for me at first, but once I learned to edit and update the cards and add my own, I really began to understand how to boil concepts down into something I could remember, i.e. I could structure it to my own personal chaotic mode of thinking, and I've flourished with it since then
I've been barely keeping my head above water (ok, much better than that honestly) for 35 years intellectually due to lack of more methodical learning. Your post might convince me of trying Anki...
I've just started using Anki and I'm almost grieving. If I had had this 15 years ago I probably would have done so much better in school. I've always struggled with memorizing, but Anki has made this much easier for me. I started learning Japanese 4 months ago and I'm baffled by how much I've retained in that period. Now I'm playing with using it to learn the rules for the OneRing TTPRG.
Same for me. I discovered spaced repetition through Anki.
It helped me study Japanese, Agile, and countless other topics, and the Android and macOS apps work perfectly together. A friend used it so much that he ended up contributing to the Android app as OSS.
> with provisions in place to ensure that Anki remains open source and true to the principles I’ve run it by all these years.
True. It should however be noted that the most active maintainer of AnkiDroid will be joining the new entity:
> We’re currently talking to David Allison, a long-time core contributor to AnkiDroid, about working together on exactly these questions. His experience with AnkiDroid’s collaborative development is invaluable, and we’re grateful he’s willing to help us get this right. We’re incredibly excited to have him join us full-time to help propel Anki into the future.
Yeah, and while they say AnkiDroid is going to be maintained by the original creator separate from AnkiHub, we won't be privy to any employment contract language that makes any work done by the employee as being property of AnkiHub. Which would be an issue.
anki has so much potential and has such a big and unique audience, it is incomprehensible to me how it has managed to be so neglected.
and then now why, of all times, when a solo developer is never more productive, would the lead maintainer cede ownership? the antidote for programming burnout has just been invented, just take it haha
What’s so bad about the paid iOS client? I remember it being expensive when I got it but it works fine for my use case (mix of getting me through part of med school, all of law school, and the just general shit I’d like to remember and learn). There’s definitely never been anything jarring about using it vs the Mac or windows clients but I’m happy for somebody to point out the problems I’ve been missing!
I paid 30€ for Anki on iOS. I remember being a bit upset because the Android and the macOS version (Qt based) are completely free. Even the iOS version is open-source. In the end, I did not want to create my own build and sideload Anki for iOS via Developer certificates, so I just paid the 30€. I think it is too expensive especially since I can easily afford that having a job and all, but I remember at uni I would struggle to afford this. But then again, when I was at uni there were no smartphones, and my computer cost less than an iPhone. So I'd probably have cheap android anyway.
To amend, I got way more than 30€ of value out of it. I learn a new language, and vocab training with Anki works better than anything else.
I also use it every day. It does its job, but it has many usability issues that make it less than ideal.
For example, copy and paste retains the text color (probably by design). So, sometimes I get black text on a black background, when the app is in dark mode.
The editing process to remove the formatting is pretty annoying.
It takes me time to find the edit button, which is buried in the menu but prominent in the desktop version. Then, I have to toggle the HTML mode and delete the retained tags, which on a phone takes time. The desktop version, instead, has a button to remove all formatting.
iOS one is fine, pretty good. I use it daily too. Ankidroid is much better, which I would attribute to being open source with lots of eyeballs on it and making improvements for the love of it.
I do too, and I hate it. Some of my pet peeves from the top of my head (there would be more most likely if I'd think a bit, but maybe later):
> I keep pressing the second button to OK a card, I rarely use the 3rd and 4th. But if I fail a card, that button becomes a NOK, and I keep pressing it out of reflex
> I can't help interpreting "card was a leech" notification other than "how dumb can you be". Fortunately there is no way to turn it off.
> It keeps phoning home for some reason, each time it gets into the foreground. It is really great when you are behind a proxy, and it keeps complaining that there is no network, every single time. Of course that call can't be turned off. Also, have no idea what it sends home. I try to trust that it's not some nefarious.
> Some years ago, for some reason Anki changed DB format, in a backwards incompatible way. There was a notification at the start of the app, that if I don't want it, I shouldn't update my app. I did turn off auto-update. A few weeks later it bricked my deck (my deck got updated to the new format, even though that old iOS app was the only way I accessed it), also trashing my 3 years long strike.
I use the iOS app daily, and while it's not the prettiest thing in the world, it has nearly every feature of the desktop client, including full scripting support for card contents, which is amazing for things like collapsable elements and media. And, at the end of the day, it's about what you learn from using it that matters.
It was a fascinating symbiotic between nerdy med students from all over the world and an obscure open source flashcard app that originally targeted language learners. I've been part of that community for many years and would have never foreseen this outcome but in hindsight it seems the best path forward for anki.
Amazing. A few nerdy med students and I started a student group for tech back in 2009 or so, a big part early on was preaching Mnemosyne (another SRS app), with shared decks syncing over a free Dropbox account.
Later used Repetitions (iOS / Mac / web) for the steps, EM boards, and informatics boards most recently.
Only within the last year finally tried Anki -- and this time for language.
If one is of a certain age, of course they studied for step I without it
and the classic method was the inspiration for Anki to begin with: making your own flashcards on index cards! You could do a version of spaced repetition by shuffling the deck.
Not sure the digital version is actually easier or more effective
Many community-oriented programs have failed after acquisition because they came out too firm, too decided, and too purposeful, only to realize the community is still skeptical and turning against them six months in.
Honestly, for a program like Anki, starting out by saying "we need to figure out what good governance looks like, as well as what might be agreeable and possible for everyone involved" is a much stronger positioning than coming up with something that may or may not fly to try make a strong first impression. Communities do not follow the conventional rules of American business.
From the posts, it sounds like the original maintainer was approaching the point where they'd just abandon it, so this overall seems like a better outcome than either abandonment or sale to a PE firm.
It seems more than a little bit careless to agree on a deal without having those very important things hammered out. What if there is disagreement about these?
Community focused organizations like this are hard to run without governance transitions. I think Anki brings value to the world and anyone willing to take on a leadership role in keeping it going should be given trust and grace to make the best decisions they can with the knowledge they have. I wish them luck.
Or: They don't want to force a specific governance model onto an existing community.
I have no deep insight here, but given the times I have seen a negative reaction from the community with ownership changes or similar, giving yourself time to figure out how to do things may actually be a good thing.
Always a bit scary when an open source project changes stewardship like this, but I'm quite relieved to see all involved parties seem to be aware of the dangers and very much on the same page about not screwing this up.
Done right, commercial interests can often have a very positive symbiotic relationship with open source. Almost all the largest and best open source projects out there have substantial involvement from commercial interests.
I do think though that from a structural/governance perspective it's not a good idea for Anki to be owned by AnkiHub. Anki is a community project, not a corporate product, and while it sounds like the license will continue to reflect that, I personally think it would be best if the corporate structure did too. If Anki were spun out as an independent foundation (like Blender, Linux, etc) receiving most of its support and development work from AnkiHub, rather than owned outright, I think that would allow a much more robust governance structure than just having everything be under AnkiHub's direct control with some pinky promises about listening to the community.
It seems like the core things that Anki needs are new user experience improvements, and algorithm updates. SM2 really shows its age as compared to other algorithms.
I think many learners are walking into a trap of thinking, if they just change their SPS algorithm, they will magically learn more. I think they might learn a little bit more, but the biggest effect is simply due to time investment and doing the repetitions. It is good to be able to practice known words less often, obviously, but that can be achieved using a very basic system already.
If changing their SPS or the promises about an SPS motivate the learner, then great, they're putting in the work and time to learn, but I doubt that the effect of changing the SPS is as large as some people claim.
For example I used a tool that supposedly uses FSPS, but it did have a low maximum for the duration you don't have to practice a word, and no way for me to "ban" a word, so that it asks me in 6 months or something, and simple words kept coming back, especially after not learning for a few days. I didn't make much progress using the tool, even though it had FSPS.
https://www.supermemo.com/en/blog/supermemo-is-better-than-f... seems to suggest that yes, it is a major improvement over SM-2, and given how critical they are of FSRS I'm happy to believe them. SM-2 to my understanding is basically the simplest possible spaced repetition algorithm - I think something like 'double the review interval if easy, otherwise multiply by some difficulty factor to reduce this interval depending on which button was clicked'.
That said, even SM-2 is probably vastly superior to just not doing SRS at all.
Yeah, FSRS is much better. For me it was the difference between learning 10 new words of Mandarin a day and learning 20, with the same time commitment.
I'm an Anki user, on and off since 10 years or so, but was still confused. If I understood correctly, the entities here are:
- Anki, as set up by dae aka Damien, is like the brand name and desktop implementation with the spaced repetition algorithm
- AnkiWeb is what I thought this hub thing was. It's where you download decks
- AnkiHub is a third party (started by "AnKing", now 35 employees) who sells decks as a monthly subscription and has their content on the deep web (you need to create an account and agree to terms to even see a listing of what's there besides a few featured parts). This is who is getting ownership of the former two. Because they write that Anki will remain open source at its "core", I presume that means that things will, at best, stay stable rather than anything (like AnkiWeb the deck sharing platform) becoming open
- AnkiDroid is a separate open source project (an Android app). The corporation is hiring the main developer, but it's not yet clear to me whether they're just going to get paid to work more on AnkiDroid or if they're also getting other tasks
> - AnkiDroid is a separate open source project (an Android app). The corporation is hiring the main developer, but it's not yet clear to me whether they're just going to get paid to work more on AnkiDroid or if they're also getting other tasks
----
To copy from my message on Discord:
> I’m moving to a full-time position working on Anki [incl. AnkiWeb & AnkiMobile]. I’m really excited about this, but there’s a mountain of pending, somewhat undefined work which will need to be done, and it’ll need my full-time attention for a while.
> I’ll still be contributing to AnkiDroid, but I won’t be able to commit as much time as I am doing currently (at least for the first few months while things stabilize). I’ll be here on evenings/weekends, and will be contributing in other ways (hopefully: unified Note Editor, JS addons etc… ), but I expect to slow down with code contributions to ensure I’m staying on on top of PR reviews & general force multiplier work. I’m definitely Org Admin’ing for GSoC over the summer [assuming Google gives us the greenlight], it’s historically been a VERY light role.
> In all honesty: I’m expecting things to be business as usual, I have more than enough capacity to keep up with the notification queue. Even if I completely dropped off the planet, we’re a great team and the improvements would keep on flowing. AnkiDroid’s bus factor has been >>> 1 for a LONG time now.
Information on Discord visible only if you sign up for it (and afaik, in some countries, upload identification)... that does seem rather in line with the deep web architecture that AnkiHub uses. Maybe this would be good in a ticket or the Anki forums, since it's relevant to the people using and contributing to the app. Here on HN it's now also findable in web searches as a side effect of copying it I guess
Worth noting you don't need to use it. Anki comes with a syncserver implementation for a while now, and there are docker images too. It's worth it for the transfer speeds alone IMO.
Anki is under AGPL too, which has an anti-DRM clause, so many type of enshittification of anki or their addons (e.g. to prevent sharing of their decks) would be unenforceable too.
As such I see no obvious things that would be susceptible to enshittification here.
(Same person as above but felt that this part had a separate purpose so I've moved it into its own comment)
The ecosystem is currently such that it seems hard to enshittify it. They say they have no intention of doing that and I believe it, but their vision of a healthy and good product might involve a fair price (for rich countries at least) whereas it was always free so far
Time will tell; it sounds like there's currently no plans either way, but it's also simply open enough that users can always just install the open source software and share decks with each other by whatever file transfer/sharing means. Everything that's already there won't simply go away. I'm going to keep using AnkiDroid and building the language deck I am working on
Readit News
It’s been a surprisingly good middle ground between fully manual cards and fully LLM dumps. If anyone’s curious: https://wordwise.me
> with provisions in place to ensure that Anki remains open source and true to the principles I’ve run it by all these years.
I really hope this holds.
And I recently wrote about making my own Anki Japanese cards in my blog[1]
[1] https://alt-romes.github.io/posts/2026-01-30-from-side-proje...
https://jisho.org/word/%E6%9A%97%E8%A8%98
Ftr Danish is a category 1 language, while Japanese is category 4 ("https://2009-2017.state.gov/m/fsi/sls/orgoverview/languages")
(AnkiDroid has always been run independently, which is good, considering the state of the iOS client, which has always been neglected.)
> We’re currently talking to David Allison, a long-time core contributor to AnkiDroid, about working together on exactly these questions. His experience with AnkiDroid’s collaborative development is invaluable, and we’re grateful he’s willing to help us get this right. We’re incredibly excited to have him join us full-time to help propel Anki into the future.
and then now why, of all times, when a solo developer is never more productive, would the lead maintainer cede ownership? the antidote for programming burnout has just been invented, just take it haha
To amend, I got way more than 30€ of value out of it. I learn a new language, and vocab training with Anki works better than anything else.
For example, copy and paste retains the text color (probably by design). So, sometimes I get black text on a black background, when the app is in dark mode.
The editing process to remove the formatting is pretty annoying.
It takes me time to find the edit button, which is buried in the menu but prominent in the desktop version. Then, I have to toggle the HTML mode and delete the retained tags, which on a phone takes time. The desktop version, instead, has a button to remove all formatting.
I don't mind so much that it's paid, given how much use I get for the price, but it sucks knowing it sucks and not being able to help make it better.
Later used Repetitions (iOS / Mac / web) for the steps, EM boards, and informatics boards most recently.
Only within the last year finally tried Anki -- and this time for language.
and the classic method was the inspiration for Anki to begin with: making your own flashcards on index cards! You could do a version of spaced repetition by shuffling the deck.
Not sure the digital version is actually easier or more effective
> Governance and decision-making: How decisions are made, who has final say, and how the community is heard
> Roadmap and priorities: What gets built when and how to balance competing needs
> The transition itself: How to bring in more support without disrupting what already works
In other words: they have no clue what to do next (https://forums.ankiweb.net/t/ankis-growing-up/68610/2#p-1905...)
Honestly, for a program like Anki, starting out by saying "we need to figure out what good governance looks like, as well as what might be agreeable and possible for everyone involved" is a much stronger positioning than coming up with something that may or may not fly to try make a strong first impression. Communities do not follow the conventional rules of American business.
I have no deep insight here, but given the times I have seen a negative reaction from the community with ownership changes or similar, giving yourself time to figure out how to do things may actually be a good thing.
Done right, commercial interests can often have a very positive symbiotic relationship with open source. Almost all the largest and best open source projects out there have substantial involvement from commercial interests.
I do think though that from a structural/governance perspective it's not a good idea for Anki to be owned by AnkiHub. Anki is a community project, not a corporate product, and while it sounds like the license will continue to reflect that, I personally think it would be best if the corporate structure did too. If Anki were spun out as an independent foundation (like Blender, Linux, etc) receiving most of its support and development work from AnkiHub, rather than owned outright, I think that would allow a much more robust governance structure than just having everything be under AnkiHub's direct control with some pinky promises about listening to the community.
It seems like the core things that Anki needs are new user experience improvements, and algorithm updates. SM2 really shows its age as compared to other algorithms.
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If changing their SPS or the promises about an SPS motivate the learner, then great, they're putting in the work and time to learn, but I doubt that the effect of changing the SPS is as large as some people claim.
For example I used a tool that supposedly uses FSPS, but it did have a low maximum for the duration you don't have to practice a word, and no way for me to "ban" a word, so that it asks me in 6 months or something, and simple words kept coming back, especially after not learning for a few days. I didn't make much progress using the tool, even though it had FSPS.
That said, even SM-2 is probably vastly superior to just not doing SRS at all.
- Anki, as set up by dae aka Damien, is like the brand name and desktop implementation with the spaced repetition algorithm
- AnkiWeb is what I thought this hub thing was. It's where you download decks
- AnkiHub is a third party (started by "AnKing", now 35 employees) who sells decks as a monthly subscription and has their content on the deep web (you need to create an account and agree to terms to even see a listing of what's there besides a few featured parts). This is who is getting ownership of the former two. Because they write that Anki will remain open source at its "core", I presume that means that things will, at best, stay stable rather than anything (like AnkiWeb the deck sharing platform) becoming open
- AnkiDroid is a separate open source project (an Android app). The corporation is hiring the main developer, but it's not yet clear to me whether they're just going to get paid to work more on AnkiDroid or if they're also getting other tasks
----
To copy from my message on Discord:
> I’m moving to a full-time position working on Anki [incl. AnkiWeb & AnkiMobile]. I’m really excited about this, but there’s a mountain of pending, somewhat undefined work which will need to be done, and it’ll need my full-time attention for a while.
> I’ll still be contributing to AnkiDroid, but I won’t be able to commit as much time as I am doing currently (at least for the first few months while things stabilize). I’ll be here on evenings/weekends, and will be contributing in other ways (hopefully: unified Note Editor, JS addons etc… ), but I expect to slow down with code contributions to ensure I’m staying on on top of PR reviews & general force multiplier work. I’m definitely Org Admin’ing for GSoC over the summer [assuming Google gives us the greenlight], it’s historically been a VERY light role.
> In all honesty: I’m expecting things to be business as usual, I have more than enough capacity to keep up with the notification queue. Even if I completely dropped off the planet, we’re a great team and the improvements would keep on flowing. AnkiDroid’s bus factor has been >>> 1 for a LONG time now.
https://discord.gg/qjzcRTx => https://discord.com/channels/368267295601983490/701922522836...
GSoC: https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/
Worth noting you don't need to use it. Anki comes with a syncserver implementation for a while now, and there are docker images too. It's worth it for the transfer speeds alone IMO.
Anki is under AGPL too, which has an anti-DRM clause, so many type of enshittification of anki or their addons (e.g. to prevent sharing of their decks) would be unenforceable too.
As such I see no obvious things that would be susceptible to enshittification here.
[0]: https://docs.ankiweb.net/sync-server.html
The ecosystem is currently such that it seems hard to enshittify it. They say they have no intention of doing that and I believe it, but their vision of a healthy and good product might involve a fair price (for rich countries at least) whereas it was always free so far
Time will tell; it sounds like there's currently no plans either way, but it's also simply open enough that users can always just install the open source software and share decks with each other by whatever file transfer/sharing means. Everything that's already there won't simply go away. I'm going to keep using AnkiDroid and building the language deck I am working on
But upon reading this I think it's high time I exported all my notes in simple text format, just in case.
Maybe also try Fernando Borretti's flashcard app I saw (and dismissed) recently here
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