(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
Writing code is fun. Solving interesting problems is fun.
Debugging deep problems is fun.
Debugging slop code is a painful suffering experience, having to constantly double check that the AI agent didn't just change the unit tests to "return true" and lie to you is tiring, and the feeling that you can't significantly improve the tool burns me out hard.
That last one can't be overstated. When I find a weird behavior that looks like a bug in the linux kernel or rustc or such, I find it exhilarating to read code and understand what the bug is, how it got there, and to feel like I can fix it and never see it again.
When claude code gives me a "wrong" output for my prompt, I don't feel like there's any possible way I can go and find what part of the Opus 4.5 model resulted in it not being able to give better output.
I feel helpless to debug what went wrong when claude code spirals into the deep end.
I can add more initial context, add skills, but those are tiny heuristic tweaks around the giant mass of incomprehensible weights and biases that no human understands.
The antidote for programming burnout is not to replace all the fun parts of programming with painful probabilistic suffering.
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.
It improved my grades so much in college that I spent the 25 bucks as a broke student so I could have it on my second hand iPad. This was before AnkiDroid even existed so it's amazing the price is still the same.
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.
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.
- 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
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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...
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.
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
I also can’t imagine making cards on a phone, given how much switching between apps/windows is involved and how poor mobile platforms are at multitasking. It’s difficult to envision it being anything but maddening.
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
Already caveating with the "core" code. Even without PE and VC, it's clear that a company with 35 employees is bound to take this in a different direction than 1 guy, and not a good one. If there comes a day where those 35 employees can't be sustained anymore by revenue, and the choice is between enshittification and shutting down/firing everyone, we'll see what happens. That's the big difference - such a decision was never on the cards, or at least much less likely, when run by a single person. Now it will be.
Big conflict of interests too. AnkiHub makes money from selling paid addons. No chance any of those will ever end up in Anki now.
Also not a good look that they immediately locked the thread in their most popular community.
https://orangeorapple.com/flashcards/
Easy to import and export my cards, plenty of options for tweaking the algorithms for my use.
It would be interesting to have machine learning predict these probability evolutions instead. Simply recollecting tangential knowledge improves the recollection of a non-sampled factoid, which is hard to model in a strict sense, or perhaps easy for (undiscovered) dedicated analytic models. Having good performing but relatively opaque (high parameter counts) ML models could be helpful because we can treat the high parameter count ML model as surrogate humans for memory recollection experiments and try to find low parameter count models (analytic or ML) that adequately distill the learning patterns, without having to do costly human-hour experiments on actual human brains.
FSRS just works, even without a GPU so it's not the cool kind of AI / machine learning these days.
No joke though: the FSRS model is marvelous, and Anki remains one of the best free + open source implementations around.
I've been learning German recently and Anki (in FSRS mode) is one of the most important learning tools I have. No joke.
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Every card remembers every rating you give it, as well as the time / date. This allows for Anki to solve for a 'forgetting curve', and predict when different cards have a chance to be forgotten.
There is furthermore the machine learning / stochastic descent algorithm to better fit the assumed forgetting curves to your historical performance. This is the FSRS Optimize parameters button in the settings panel.
https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/fsrs4anki/wiki/The...
> I ended up suggesting to them that we look into gradually transitioning business operations and open source stewardship over, with provisions in place to ensure that Anki remains open source and true to the principles I’ve run it by all these years.
> This is a step back for me rather than a goodbye - I will still be involved with the project, albeit at a more sustainable level.
From AnkiHub:
> No enshittification. We’ve seen what happens when VC-backed companies acquire beloved tools. That’s not what this is. There are no investors involved, and we’re not here to extract value from something the community built together. Building in the right safeguards and processes to handle pressure without stifling necessary improvements is something we’re actively considering.
Relieved at that part where they say there are no investors involved, makes the whole thing a whole lot less risky. Good for everyone involved, and here's to many more years with Anki :)
But finding out there are no VCs, no investors, I’ll stay with Anki for now.
But still, these HN comments - after an announcement like this - are usually a good place to find out about replacements.
Anki is in a very solid position to be forked if anything happens, so even if this is bad news I have faith in the larger community.
I was reminded that AnkiHub's business model is selling Anki add-ons.
So it seems clear they would decline to add competing features to Anki, but instead create an add-on to sell instead, and never add it as a feature to Anki.
Impressively, Mochi now offers FSRS (beta but still available in the app's main settings) and both the type of scheduler (Mochi default or FSRS) and the schedulers' settings are configurable on a deck-by-deck basis.
The developer is very responsive to folks on the forum and often quickly adds requested features.
Overall the app is well-designed and fun to use. I appreciate the swipe left/right to fail/pass cards on iOS. My one complaint is that the web clipper only works with Chrome and Firefox, but not with Safari (surprisingly). It would also be useful to have a global hotkey/palette to quick-add cards to various decks, similar to how OmniFocus lets you quickly add items to the OF Inbox.
Technically this can be implemented in Anki as an addon. But only the desktop version supports addons and the default UI is a bit too complicated.
AnkiHub was already annoying with shoving AI into their Add-On without anyone asking for it.
I don't think this will go well
It might not be the worst idea to do that anyway. Anki is great, but there's plenty of room for improvement. Off the top of my head, an architecture that doesn't involve fragile and finicky python bits and is designed to support multiple independent clients would be a nice step up (Telegram is a good model here — make a core lib with all the nuts and bolts which devs build clients around).
That is modern Anki. The core is a Rust library, which all the clients (desktop, web, Android and iOS) use. [0]
Even so, I believe there's room for another open competitor or two in this space.
With that out of the way, some thoughts:
- Anki is in a really good position to work around enshitification. The app, at least to me, is "complete" - the only additional features that might pique my curiosity is a different scheduler (at the moment, they're integrating a newer one, although I don't follow enough to know the state of it). Additionally, modern Anki is really well architected: the core of it is a Rust library, that is used by all of the platforms [0]. You can write new front ends using that, or just fork the existing FOSS ones. Maybe dae does a gorhill and gives us Anki Origin.
- Really the only service-y part of Anki I use is AnkiWeb, which is basically a backup and sync system. Wonder how that'll evolve (if they do end up charging for it, I hope it is "Obsidian" reasonable). EDIT: Ooo, Anki has public server software for running your own version. Awesome! [1]
- The idea outcome in my opinion would have been some form of charitable organisation (Linux Foundation?), with people donating to support Anki.
- So, AnkiHub is a company that produces Anki flashcards, and they've scaled that quickly? Jeez. Obviously Quizlet proved there was a market for flashcards, but I didn't realise this was possible for Anki.
- No outside investment is... hopeful. Not quite sure what indicates that this company has the technical know-how to maintain it.
- I've heard too many stories of a maintainer or creative being "hopeful" about their new acquirers, only to regret it years down the line.
Obviously, like all ignorant people do, I am going to oversimplify things here. But still, to me, the "platonic idea" of Anki seems a dead simple thing. All what I care about when using Anki is what's on the 2 sides of a Card, a question + answer, which can only be some visual image (possibly encoded as text, possibly just JPEG, I really don't care as long as it fits in my mobile device memory) + optional sound. That's really it. If it should be bi-directional or uni-directional card is a detail of how the deck is generated/encoded, and the spaced repetition algorithm is a detail of the app that I use to study (so, usually AnkiDroid, I imagine — an unaffiliated 3rd party; who even uses desktop apps nowadays?).
So, I imagine there can exist (and do exist) some minor additional features, like an ability to require a typed answer for a card, but it seems pretty minor, and I really don't see a lot of room for the app to evolve.
So, ultimately people need only a common .apkg format, which exists and is relatively simple (although I suppose it could've been even simplier), and a place like AnkiWeb, where people can share their decks, so Spanish top-2000 or basic integrals deck isn't re-invented over and over again. It's a pity that AnkiWeb isn't more open and will be even less open from now on, but as long as someone is willing to just host it (which is ultimately just paying for downloads traffic) it's easy to replicate, so no super-valuable IP here.
Of course, a primary use-case for Anki is a tool to make decks, but you could really do with pretty simple python script + YAML/JSON/CSV/whatever metadata file to convert it to AnkiDroid-compatible .apkg file.
So, basically, who cares? What is to "own" there?
So an app-store of sorts.
As others have said, there are some provisions in place that make it allegedly harder to do a hard landgrab and keep people from freely sharing decks, to to me, even if it were so, I would not be too concerned.
In my opinion, the very act of creating one's deck is a key part of the learning. Maybe it's different for larning vocabulary, but as you said, it will be very hard to make those hard to share.
Learning a deck generated by someone else has never been as effective with me, so I think it's a false sense of time saving to use those.
This is damn near the least effective way to use Anki. Cloze deletion alone surpasses this.
Also, Anki is SRS. The value of Anki is in the rescheduling, not in the fact it's flashcards. And Anki has implemented the FSRS rescheduling algorithm, which is just one more feature not all flashcard apps do.
AnkiHub's modus operandi has been to take over communities or projects where free exchange happens and monetize/paywall them. If you've been a part of the /r/medicalschoolanki subreddit, you know exactly what I mean. It's been hollowed out completely.
In the post, AnkiHub mentions how Anki is "sacred" to them. Yet, they have had no qualms entrenching themselves into Anki's settings menu as the only third-party ever to do so. [1] I am sure more is to come. And the language used in their post almost never helps their case, especially in the pricing and OSS sections.
I understand why Damien felt a bottleneck in Anki's development. This is similar to what was happening with Bram and Vim. Ultimately, the community forked and built Neovim. Gorhill had also similarly transferred uBlock, but then came back and built uBlock Origin. So the precedents are there.
Probably, the most important things right now are:
1) Creating a single fork of the Anki core + desktop client people can migrate to. Sort of like a "Anki Classic" if you will.
2) Making those forks point to a hosted version of Anki's sync server [2] so that people can sync decks.
3) Saving and preserving all of the shared decks on AnkiWeb [3]. The ToS [4] mention that all decks shared there are "property" of AnkiWeb, so I wouldn't be surprised if they were very quickly paywalled.
4) Creating an alternative hub where people can share their decks that's not AnkiWeb. This should be relatively simple as decks are just .apkg files. The terms of this new hub should make it so that all content uploaded has a non-restrictive license.
This can be our Neovim moment, it's just about how we handle it.
If anyone is thinking about doing this, or would like to contribute, please share it in this thread. I, and I am sure many other HNers, would be willing to contribute time, effort, and finances.
[0] https://www.ankihub.net/about-us [1] https://github.com/ankitects/anki/pull/3232 [2] https://docs.ankiweb.net/sync-server.html [3] https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks [4] https://ankiweb.net/account/terms