Native "Advance" and "Postpone" Options for AnkiDroid/AnkiMobile

Anki Suggestions
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Feature Suggestion: Native “Advance” and “Postpone” Options for AnkiDroid/AnkiMobile

It would be incredibly useful to have the “Advance” and “Postpone” features from the FSRS Helper add-on natively integrated into Anki, both on the desktop and mobile versions.

Use Case: I primarily use Anki Desktop for creating and managing my cards, but I do my reviews on my mobile phone. Often, I find myself with unexpected pockets of time throughout my day—waiting for a delayed train, at a doctor’s appointment, or during other short breaks. While these moments are often unplanned, they occur regularly (about once a week), and I’d like to make the most of them by using the time to study.

The “Advance” and “Postpone” features in FSRS Helper are perfect for this use case, allowing me to review additional cards when I have more time or push back less urgent reviews when I run out of time. Unfortunately, the FSRS Helper add-on works only on Anki Desktop and isn’t available for mobile devices. Since I typically don’t have my laptop with me during these moments, I’m unable to access the add-on on mobile.

While the “Learn Ahead” feature in custom study does provide some similar functionality, it doesn’t work as well for my needs. For example, it might reintroduce cards that I’ve already reviewed earlier the same day, whereas “Advance” and “Postpone” allow for better control over the cards I review.

Having the “Advance” and “Postpone” functionality natively available on Anki Mobile would significantly improve my ability to make use of short, unexpected free time and help boost my overall learning progress.

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The problem with both of them (and especially Postpone) is that they are easy to abuse.

Disperse Siblings? No way to abuse that. It just disperses siblings once when Anki starts and that’s it.

Easy Days? The worst that a user can do is set every single day to “Minimum”, but it won’t break anything. In fact, it won’t do anything at all since all “Normal” = all “Reduced” = all “Minimum”. So the worst is just the user complaining. Hopefully, in the built-in implementation the warning is sufficient.
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But Advance and Postpone are different. Advance is less likely to be abused since increasing the number of due cards is something that fewer people want than decreasing the number of due cards. So a very likely scenario is this:
Day 1: “Ah, man, I don’t want to do all these cards today. I will postpone a lot of them”.
Day 2: “Ah, man, I don’t want to do all these cards today. I will postpone a lot of them”.
Day 3: “Ah, man, I don’t want to do all these cards today. I will postpone a lot of them”.
Day 4: …

You see where this is going. The user ends up breaking their schedule and creating a backlog.

Another concern is users becoming so dependent on these features that they forget that adjusting desired retention is the intended way to control the number of reviews. And then you will see people who do all kinds of weird combinations of Advance and Postpone every day instead of just changing desired retention.

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You could try using filtered decks to get a “Custom Study” that works more to your liking.

e.g.: deck:YOUR_DECK prop:ivl>7 prop:due=1 would get you cards that are due tomorrow, but you have not seen in the last week.

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A better way to simulate “Advance” would be using something like prop:r<desired_retention.

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I’ve played with

prop:r<0.8 prop:ivl>=1 prop:due>=1 is:review -is:suspended -is:buried -prop:resched=0 -rated:1

however this is far from comfortable. The add-on matches automatically for each deck against the corresponding desired retention.

(I did not make a filter for postpone, because I bare use postpone. Advance however is more important.)