Eight years of Anki ends today

I’ve talked about the Anki flashcard app a lot on here over the years, and for good reason. If you’re not familiar with it, this post from a few years ago is a good summary. As of today, I’ve used it every day for 8 years (2,923 days in a row); consistent since June 6, 2018. I actually started using it in late 2015, but wasn’t consistent until that day in 2018.

Over that time I’ve reviewed roughly 1.1 million cards (or just under 300/day). I’ve used it to remember the names of hundreds of people, understand geography better, keep up with ideas from books that I’ve read, and help to dominate at trivia from “The Office”.

Today is my last day using Anki, but the learning is just beginning.

As I shared a few weeks ago, I’ve been building an app called Ripple Recall to potentially replace it. Whenever I start new projects like that, sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn’t. I’ve built a lot of neat apps that I’ve shared on this page, but I’ve also built a bunch that were duds (such as an idea to help with local search rankings, and a different one to help me learn Spanish in a new way). The ideas are fun, but they don’t always work out.

With that in mind, I’ve been using Ripple Recall and Anki side-by-side for the last few weeks. I wanted to put Ripple through the paces to see if it could do everything I need, but I also kept poking at Anki so that I wouldn’t lose my streak if I decided Ripple couldn’t handle it.

It can, so off we go.

Why switch?

If you’re an Anki user reading this, I’m not necessarily saying you should switch. Anki is a fantastic app, and has a few key advantages over Ripple. In particular, they are:

• Local sync. When you study on Anki, the cards are fully synced to your computer/phone, so you can study completely offline and you can trust that you’ll have your cards even if the Anki server disappeared.
• Tons of available decks. While I still believe the core benefit to these apps is creating your own decks of content that you want to learn, downloading prebuilt decks from others is a big part of the benefit, and Anki has tons of them (though I’ve been adding a lot to Ripple as well).
• More powerful features. Ripple has the core types of decks to use (Q&A and Cloze), but Anki has a lot more you can do. They’re overkill for the average user, but excellent for power users.
• An amazing community. There are thousands of Anki users around the world, and getting tips and advice from them on places like /r/Anki/ is unbeatable.

So why am I moving to Ripple? Here are my reasons:

• Easier sharing. Sharing decks on Anki is powerful, but confusing for novice users and essentially impossible to do on your phone (you really need to sync to your computer, grab the shared deck, sync again, and then sync on your phone). With Ripple, it’s just one click to share any deck.
• Easier cramming. While these tools are meant for long-term learning and not cramming for a quick test, I still found myself wanting to cram on Anki and it’s kind of painful process. With Ripple it’s just one click away for any deck or tagged group of cards.
• Books. While you can certainly grab a deck of cards in Anki for a particular book, Ripple has dozens built in with more on the way, and they’re treated differently than normal decks to help keep things clean. Here’s more about how that works.
• Better tools for learning names. I’ve used Anki heavily for learning faces <=> names, but with Ripple I’ve added more features to help with that process. I’ve loosely used Ron White’s technique for helping remember names (which he shares here) and I’ve built some special mnemonic tools into Ripple to help with that. More details coming soon.

My biggest problem with Anki was trying to get others to use it. I know just how powerful it can be, but getting started is more of a hurdle than many people were willing to do. My hope is that Ripple makes it super easy for people to get started and appreciate the value of this kind of learning.

The app is completely free for life, and the fact that I’m now using it as my daily driver means that it will continue to get little tweaks and enhancements to make it better and better over time.

Give it a try at RippleRecall.com and let me know what you think!