I’m happy to support development by paying a high price for the iOS app given how helpful Anki has been for me overall and how it’s completely free on desktop. The Anki experience as a whole more than justifies $30, but I do wish the iOS app had more features to justify its cost specifically.
A few things I can think of that would really improve my experience:
- Widgets that show your cards throughout the day to passively refresh you. I understand for some decks this may be quite challenging technically, but I have seen some pretty complex widgets, some of which are interactive and allow you to tap a button to change info. It’d be awesome to see my cards and tap the button to flip or go to the next card.
- Similarly, an optional notification with a random card selected as a quiz question, like “do you remember what this means?” with a display of the card attached.
- A Watch app similarly would be challenging but appreciated. I don’t necessarily need to sit there answering cards on that tiny display but having Anki display the text of a card as a widget that rotates on a complication would be cool.
Perhaps to mitigate the complexity of these features, they could explicitly only work with decks that use a specific template. I would not mind building out a separate deck specifically to work with features like this. Like I assume one for widgets would need to forgo most multimedia or complex formatting, the Watch one would need a tight character limit, etc.
I could even see basic features like showing a badge notification for how many cards you have left today or just basic notifications at a set time that gets sent out if you haven’t finished yet today. Stuff like that would go a long way imo.
I know that with the nature of Anki being a wildly customizable flash card app, where a given card could have formatted text, HTML, audio, images, etc, it’s not realistic to expect it to do everything. I enjoy the app quite a bit already. But it would just be cool to see it take a little more advantage of the iOS platform. Right now I have to seek out other apps to fill in these gaps, which isn’t the worst thing in the world but I’d rather use Anki for a more curated experience.