Comment by infotainment
8 hours ago
On the plus side, the actually good mobile Anki client, AnkiDroid, remains out of the hands of this potentially questionable new entity.
(AnkiDroid has always been run independently, which is good, considering the state of the iOS client, which has always been neglected.)
True. It should however be noted that the most active maintainer of AnkiDroid will be joining the new entity:
> 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.
Yeah, and while they say AnkiDroid is going to be maintained by the original creator separate from AnkiHub, we won't be privy to any employment contract language that makes any work done by the employee as being property of AnkiHub. Which would be an issue.
anki has so much potential and has such a big and unique audience, it is incomprehensible to me how it has managed to be so neglected.
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
My experience using AI is that it wildly increases burnout, not decreases it.
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 use the official iOS client everyday. What’s wrong with it?
iOS one is fine, pretty good. I use it daily too. Ankidroid is much better, which I would attribute to being open source with lots of eyeballs on it and making improvements for the love of it.
What’s so bad about the paid iOS client? I remember it being expensive when I got it but it works fine for my use case (mix of getting me through part of med school, all of law school, and the just general shit I’d like to remember and learn). There’s definitely never been anything jarring about using it vs the Mac or windows clients but I’m happy for somebody to point out the problems I’ve been missing!
The (paid!) iOS client has always been a disappointment to me, and I've long been jealous of the open source Android one.
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.
I've just bought it to support the developer, as it was according to his website his preferred way to support him.
Agreed. I’m particularly excited that they’ll be investing in the UI/UX.
Is it still 25$ price? Makes it impossible to recommend Anki to friends/students to "try spaced repetition".
Just have them use it on their computer or the web?
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.
The web client works just fine!