I’m a dedicated user who truly values Anki’s offline-first philosophy and its reliability without needing internet access. However, I find it utterly frustrating that notifications only work if the app remains open or running in the background. Requiring manual reopening just to check pending reviews makes the app feel essentially useless—especially since its core purpose is to remind me to study, not force me to remember to open it.
The explanation that AnkiMobile “needs to be running in the background to schedule notifications” strikes me as weak. I use multiple offline apps on iOS that manage to send notifications even when fully closed. This isn’t a technical limitation—it’s a design choice that severely hampers user experience and the app’s effectiveness.
“AnkiMobile needs to be able to run in the background… because it’s an offline-first app.”
— dae, Anki Forums
Other apps, even without internet connectivity, can rely on iOS’s notification scheduling system to deliver alerts—without needing to stay open. There’s no valid excuse why AnkiMobile can’t do the same.
To improve usability and ensure users actually study when they need to, I strongly urge you to implement:
System-scheduled local notifications (banners, alerts, badges), even when the app is completely closed.
Automated reminders that trigger as soon as cards become due—or at least reliably once per day—without relying on the app staying open.
These changes would dramatically improve the app’s usability. I paid for AnkiMobile as a serious study tool, not a passive reminder that doesn’t remind me at all unless I actively keep it open. Please prioritize this – users expect dependable reminders for their daily reviews.
Thank you for your great work on a powerful tool. With proper notification support, AnkiMobile will truly fulfill its purpose for learners everywhere.
Major apps implement such features in some way but general iOS app developers often say that such features don’t work so maybe the difficulty of development could be very high.
I can confidently say that’s not the case. In fact, I know at least five developers who could implement this in under ten minutes. If there’s interest, I can even connect you with some of them. It’s unbelievable that such a great app is still missing something so simple
I’m not related to the official Anki so you’ll probably need to contact them directly, but AnkiMobile is closed source and as far as I know they very rarely recruit programmers or ask for code so I think that might be a bit difficult. (IMO they prioritize developing features used by all Anki users like Anki for desktop and the launcher.)
That is what AnkiMobile uses. But to be able to schedule a local alert, you need to calculate how many cards are due at that particular time. Each time you leave AnkiMobile, it has to check how many cards will be due tomorrow, and schedule a badge update to show you, and do so before iOS kills it. It could calculate multiple days in advance, but that extra computation requires more CPU/battery. And as AnkiMobile is intended to be used on a daily or near-daily basis, those extra lookups for the days ahead would be wasted for most users.
For users who set their learn ahead limit to 0, we could be scheduling a notification when the first learning card (or some threshold of them) becomes due. That does seem useful, and is already on the todo list.
That sounds interesting, and I think it would help. What I don’t want is to have to open the app every day just to check whether I have cards to review.
While proper notifications are still missing — as they really should be built in — I had to resort to this workaround: anki-push-u, Creating a Tiny Pushover Addon for Anki (Google it, because it’s not possible to post a link here.)
It actually works quite well, but only if I keep my computer on with the script running in the background, and make sure it never goes to sleep. In other words, it’s a hack just to get something that should already be a native feature in AnkiMobile.
It’s frustrating to rely on this kind of workaround for such a basic function. Local notifications aren’t a luxury; they’re the bare minimum to support the daily review habit the app is supposed to encourage.
Such notifications are popular with some Anki users, but I guess there’s low demand from Anki power users. Anki power users are medical students and multilingual learners, typically they have hundreds of review cards every day, they always have review cards and do not need to check them so a daily reminder is sufficient.
Hi! Just here to add that this is something I’ve wanted to see for a while.
In my opinion, the simplest and most useful version of this feature would be for the app, upon being sent to the background, to find when the next card for any deck is due and schedule one single system notification for that time.
This would either be at some time in the current day (which is the main scenario for me where I’d like to see a notification!) or at the “Next day starts at” time.
If there are no cards due until after the next day, I think it would be reasonable not to schedule a notification at all - as it sounds like this would take too long to process? Although I’m sure there’s many that would find that useful, if it is possible.
I don’t think there would need to be a new notification for every card or every deck (in fact, I would not want that) - just one for the very next card. The main point would be to remind the user “hey, you should probably reopen Anki again”.
Appreciate your hard work on the app - hope you can get around to some version of this feature soon. If you start taking outside contributions for the iOS app I’d be happy to help. Thanks.