I downloaded AnkiMobile for iOS for 30€ (!!!) and I am totally disappointed
Seems like you cannot install a plugin like “remove 2 of four answer options” like it can be done on the desktop app.
You cannot swipe left/right to say “correct/incorrect”, only clicking the small 4 buttons (Again/Hard/Good/Easy) at the bottom
Worse than that, swiping left moves you back to “Custom Study Session / My deck” menu and swiping right moves you to the “Decks” bottom menu with miriad of options that I will never need.
To start the cards again, you have to make like 10 annoying clicks instead of just entering the deck again. Why so complex? Why this weird “custom study” mode instead of just studying so many as I wish (normally it is around 1000 cards on an active day).
I just need a counter of correct/incorrect cards and start at the same place where I finished. Please see how it is working in Quizlet…
Overall, the app is worse and uglier than the free version of Quizlet in everything, apart from that it supports tags somehow (I still cannot filter without breaking the current “custom study” filter).
It is overall unclear how to filter by given tags and just study by it. Looks like I have to make some new “custom study” option which takes dozens of minutes to configure
Even on the desktop app, I cannot create a new separate “custom study” with another set of tags. I cannot even change the tags on the current “Custom study” and cannot even remove the current “custom study” and start a new one. What the…?
On both UIs (desktop and mobile) the cards disappear after finishing the study, replaced with this senseless “Congratulations! You have finished this deck for now.” message instead of statistics plus an option to restart the same deck with thes same filters
After adding a new card and a new “Custom study” filter (by deleting the old one!!!) on the desktop, it does not refresh after syncing on the iOS app. Even “Browse” is still displaying the old cards only
Is there an option to make it work just “swipe left as incorrect, swipe right as correct”, the same perfect way it is intuitively working out of the box in Quilzet?
Overall, the app quality is worse than you can imagine, it is not worth the price of 30 euro, it is just an unusable peace of … software. You cannot use it to study, unfortunately
There are many points of dissatisfaction. I can’t address them all now due to time constraints, but I would like to point you to the settings, where swipes and tabs can be configured to an extent not possible in any other app on my phone. Many other aspects can be solved via the custom study feature or simply sticking with Anki‘s primary mode of action (reviewing what is due). While it is perfectly possible to choose a subset of cards with a few clicks, this does not need to be the norm. Anki prompts you to review what is due and the card‘s state chances over time. Cramming (going over a huge amount of cards again and again in a short span of time) is most often not recommended for studying.
It is not possible on Anki Mobile to install add-ons.
If you want a Quizlet-like experience and Anki is too sophisticated for your needs, you should maybe stick with Quizlet and ask Apple for a refund.
If you dislike Anki’s UI, I think Anki will not help your learning. Forcing yourself to use it will probably demotivate you to learn and make you dislike learning. Just like forcing yourself to eat a lot of broccoli you don’t like will make you hate cooking.
In this case, I think using your favorite app is more effective for your learning. The most important factor in learning is regularity, not algorithms. If it’s your favorite way to learn, paper flashcards will work just as effectively.
So you can request a refund from Apple and use Quizlet. Spaced Repetition on Quizlet is available for $35.99 per year or $7.99 per month. Spaced Repetition is about 20 times more efficient than traditional learning, but if you don’t have a lot of cards, or if you are only going to study for a short period of time, there is not much advantage to using Spaced Repetition. The free version of Quizlet is sufficient.
If you need more than 10,000 flashcards or need a high-performance learning algorithm, you can consider using Anki. Anki is optimized for them and works conveniently.
Otherwise, you can look for beautiful card designs in Anki. In Anki most of the time is spent reviewing cards, so the look of the UI is not important. No one stares at the UI for a long time.Thus, Anki users who want to use beautiful designs will try to make their cards look good. The Anki community is very large, so you can look for them.
It sounds like Anki may not be a good fit for you, and I second the above recommendations to see if you can get a refund from Apple. But to touch on some of the points you raised:
If you don’t want to see the answer buttons, they can be hidden in the review preferences, and then you can tap on the right of the screen to answer good, and the left to answer bad. You can configure swipes to do this instead, but tapping is faster, which is why it’s the default.
