I'm an Anki user, on and off since 10 years or so, but was still confused. If I understood correctly, the entities here are:
- Anki, as set up by dae aka Damien, is like the brand name and desktop implementation with the spaced repetition algorithm
- AnkiWeb is what I thought this hub thing was. It's where you download decks
- AnkiHub is a third party (started by "AnKing", now 35 employees) who sells decks as a monthly subscription and has their content on the deep web (you need to create an account and agree to terms to even see a listing of what's there besides a few featured parts). This is who is getting ownership of the former two. Because they write that Anki will remain open source at its "core", I presume that means that things will, at best, stay stable rather than anything (like AnkiWeb the deck sharing platform) becoming open
- AnkiDroid is a separate open source project (an Android app). The corporation is hiring the main developer, but it's not yet clear to me whether they're just going to get paid to work more on AnkiDroid or if they're also getting other tasks
> - AnkiDroid is a separate open source project (an Android app). The corporation is hiring the main developer, but it's not yet clear to me whether they're just going to get paid to work more on AnkiDroid or if they're also getting other tasks
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To copy from my message on Discord:
> I’m moving to a full-time position working on Anki [incl. AnkiWeb & AnkiMobile]. I’m really excited about this, but there’s a mountain of pending, somewhat undefined work which will need to be done, and it’ll need my full-time attention for a while.
> I’ll still be contributing to AnkiDroid, but I won’t be able to commit as much time as I am doing currently (at least for the first few months while things stabilize). I’ll be here on evenings/weekends, and will be contributing in other ways (hopefully: unified Note Editor, JS addons etc… ), but I expect to slow down with code contributions to ensure I’m staying on on top of PR reviews & general force multiplier work. I’m definitely Org Admin’ing for GSoC over the summer [assuming Google gives us the greenlight], it’s historically been a VERY light role.
> In all honesty: I’m expecting things to be business as usual, I have more than enough capacity to keep up with the notification queue. Even if I completely dropped off the planet, we’re a great team and the improvements would keep on flowing. AnkiDroid’s bus factor has been >>> 1 for a LONG time now.
https://discord.gg/qjzcRTx => https://discord.com/channels/368267295601983490/701922522836...
GSoC: https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/
Information on Discord visible only if you sign up for it (and afaik, in some countries, upload identification)... that does seem rather in line with the deep web architecture that AnkiHub uses. Maybe this would be good in a ticket or the Anki forums, since it's relevant to the people using and contributing to the app. Here on HN it's now also findable in web searches as a side effect of copying it I guess
This is the Discord server which AnkiDroid has used for dev for just under 6 years. Nothing AnkiHub related.
It needn't be related to the corp for it to be a match made in heaven
This sounds concerning. Someone ought to back up the public AnkiWeb decks while we still can.
> AnkiWeb
Worth noting you don't need to use it. Anki comes with a syncserver implementation for a while now, and there are docker images too. It's worth it for the transfer speeds alone IMO.
Anki is under AGPL too, which has an anti-DRM clause, so many type of enshittification of anki or their addons (e.g. to prevent sharing of their decks) would be unenforceable too.
As such I see no obvious things that would be susceptible to enshittification here.
Aha [0], that is neat.
[0]: https://docs.ankiweb.net/sync-server.html
I've tried several times before to install syncserver using those pip instructions, on multiple platforms, without success.
Just as a counterpoint, to avoid people getting the wrong idea about the complexity involved - I use it and it took literally minutes. The most confusing part was that the sync settings in Ankidroid referred to Ankiweb.
Hey, could you put in an issue, especially regarding the pain points, but also including what 'seems unusual': https://github.com/ankidroid/Anki-Android
It's mostly due to time/resource/technical constraints [some of our strings come from a shared backend], but we can do better here, especially if there's now a lot more community interest in the feature.
Pull requests welcome! Do feel free to get in touch on the issue/Discord.
Was about to do that, but it turned out it's already fixed in the current version - so literally the only minor issue I hit on my way to a custom sync server is resolved already :)
The pip instructions are bad. Typical Python things: Non-reproducible, not involving a proper lock file. Cargo instructions seem not much better, since they are only referring to a tag in the git repo. The installation from "package build" leak user and password in shell history.
Overall this doesn't inspire much confidence in how solid and tested the procedure is.
The page is on GitHub:
https://github.com/ankitects/anki-manual/blob/main/src/sync-...
Full disclaimer - it's a feature which AnkiDroid supports, but isn't one which I use.
I see. I am not claiming, that it is your job to fix that.
On that page though, the same issues are present. The pip install does not make use of any lock file.
Isn't a command we should be seeing in 2026. Unless it is a one-off experiment setup. There should be proper lock files, not just version numbers, especially in the Python and JS ecosystems this has become less and less acceptable. Leaks username and password to shell command history. Again, can be fine for a one-off quick hack, but is not a great practice, since the shell command history is not the most secure place to store ones credentials in. This could be easily mitigated by adding leading " " (space), at least in environments I am familiar with, but better would probably be putting the credentials in a config file, so that they never hit the shell command history.The repo already has a lock file for uv. It would be better to make use of that lock file, when using Python to install. And in fact, when one downloads a release of Anki for desktop and runs it the first time, it does make use of uv, creating a venv, and (unconfirmed) hopefully makes use of the uv lock file.
I see these kinds of issues very frequently in Python projects. As someone, who has previously worked on providing docker images for data science workflows, enabling reproducible research, I am quite sensitive to this. But also I hear from friends, that they are traumatized by Python projects installing things in system python and other shenanigans. In general there seem to be tons of people doing Python projects, who don't have a clear idea of how to make things safe and reproducible, which is giving Python projects in general a bad reputation. All while good solutions to these problems exist and existed for years.
In fairness, Python as an ecosystem doesn't make it clear, either. I used to write a ton of Python back in the v2 days. I came back to Python to write a web crawler in summer 2025 and couldn't believe how it was still a bunch of arcane commands to create a virtual environment and install dependencies and capture the dependencies. Yes, an IDE like Pycharm handles this (thank goodness), but jiminy crickets, why doesn't "pip" refuse to even work until you've done "pip init" which generates a requirements.txt and then every pip install should check for a requirements.txt in the PWD. If it doesn't exist, refuse to install the dep. If the file does exist, append the version of the dep to that file.
It's 2026. Even JavaScript can do this.
pip is the de facto manager for the entire language. It should be better. With Node Package Manager for JS, the installation default is at the project level. You have to do a command line override to install globally.
PIP is the opposite. In fact, the only way to install at the project level is to create a virtual environment and trick PIP into thinking it's installing at the global level!
What language operates like this in 2026? Maven installs at the project level. Unison at the project level. Haskell at the project level. JS/TS at the project level.
Try docker: https://github.com/ankitects/anki/tree/main/docs/syncserver#...
(Same person as above but felt that this part had a separate purpose so I've moved it into its own comment)
The ecosystem is currently such that it seems hard to enshittify it. They say they have no intention of doing that and I believe it, but their vision of a healthy and good product might involve a fair price (for rich countries at least) whereas it was always free so far
Time will tell; it sounds like there's currently no plans either way, but it's also simply open enough that users can always just install the open source software and share decks with each other by whatever file transfer/sharing means. Everything that's already there won't simply go away. I'm going to keep using AnkiDroid and building the language deck I am working on
Worth mentioning too is the FSRS algorithm for scheduling cards is implemented in separate libraries which are released under MIT license.
The iOS app has never been free and that's the way most people use it these days. Desktop computing is a niche.
This may be true, but as someone who picked up Anki as a desktop app back around 2009 it feels a little crazy.
I also can’t imagine making cards on a phone, given how much switching between apps/windows is involved and how poor mobile platforms are at multitasking. It’s difficult to envision it being anything but maddening.
That's how some people do their "computing" these days, if they do any that deserves the name at all. I had to do some of that on vacation. With a modern phone it's possible, but mentally taxing. Phones feel like MS-DOS operating systems, where each application is fullscreen. Most people are just consumers. This is probably true for Anki decks as well. Only a small minority creates decks, the vast majority only consumes.
Desktop for creating cards, mobile for reviewing them.
I prefer a laptop for reviewing because it’s still portable, but also more amenable to comfort for longer sessions and makes spot corrections easier.
Who is this
Why'd people choose a closed ecosystem but then care about open software? I assume the main crowd is on AnkiDroid, either via f-droid or google play, and that the few iOS people don't care about a new corporation taking over the rights
In America perhaps. Android is more popular in other countries, most people I know use Anki for free. The desktop app and sync are useful for editing cards and managing a large collection. Both of those are free too, but for how long?
It's very unlikely that a majority of Anki users only uses the iOS app.
1. Anki isn't your everyday application with your everyday audience.
2. The number of people willing to splash $25 on an iOS flashcard app without first having tried it for free elsewhere, is incredibly small.
> The iOS app has never been free and that's the way most people use it these days.
Where are you getting the stats that drive this claim? How are you measuring usage on platforms that don't necessarily collect usage metrics, e.g. desktop versions?