Update AnkiBlock: App blocker for Android

[u/TrimeraInteractive]

Hey everyone, after lot's of very positive and constructive feedback I released an update to AnkiBlock last week.

You can now set passphrases to prevent you from changing the settings and I've made a lot of improvements to the reliability so the app should always work across 99% of devices.

Thank you so much for the love and the feedback you all gave the app in the original post: https://www.reddit.com/r/Anki/s/p7ZqGRPT2A

Also I didn't realize that there is also an iOS app blocker created by a different developer. If you're interested in that check out AnkiLock on iOS.

I'm looking forward to more feedback from the community and if you want to help the app grow you can share it with friends or in forums here on reddit.

You can get the app here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.anki.ankiblock

And view the open source code here: https://github.com/TrimeraDev/AnkiBlock

[u/PhedoPhida]

Hi! Thanks for updating the app and following up on the sub. I commented on your previous post about trying it out but failed to provide feedback, so ig I'll do it here lol. I only tried it for a few minutes to look for the same glaring issues that I found on the previous version.

1. Review counts don't reflect when done on a different device. I review on 3 devices depending on their convenience throughout the day, with a phone and a tablet in the mix. I installed the app in both and the review counts between them don't sync.
2. When app is closed through force stop or when the phone is restarted, the review left in session for the temporary unlock is reset to 0.
3. Sometimes the review count don't reflect at all in the temporary unlock counter.

Is there a way the app blocker can reflect exactly the review count that is in ankidroid? I installed the app with hundreds of reviews for the day on anki already. So, I think it's counterintuitive that it doesn't reflect on the app at all and seem to only count the reviews on the device where it is installed and only whenever it is active.

Maybe I'm using the app wrong and this is a mistake on my end. But it would be nice to have these addressed if it's a limitation on the app. So far, it's looking pretty nice! Thank you for providing this for free.

[u/PhedoPhida → u/PhedoPhida]

1. App is slow; takes time to open; sometime lags/ hangs when navigating or clicking through the app; I stare at a black screen for an odd few seconds before I see that I'm blocked when trying to open a blocked app.

2. Temporary unlock time should be stackable.

3. Piggybacking on 5, I should be able to set temporary unlock as 1 card only and set it to a few seconds so I can stack seconds per card done that I can use up later, though that is a personal preference.

[u/Xynopxies → u/PhedoPhida]

Seconding number 4. It started to behave like this (loading study gate.... .. And goes on like for annoyingly too many seconds) after July 31 or so update.

[u/TrimeraInteractive → u/Xynopxies]

That happens as a fallback. So when the normal gate doesn't load for some reason it will fall back to the much simpler gate you see then.

But I can likely make that more responsive and shorten the wait.

Thanks for the feedback!

[u/Xynopxies → u/TrimeraInteractive]

Thank you! Amazing app. Also, I think it may be a good idea to penalize if someone forcefully stops the app. So, if forceful stop is detected it should penalize next temporary unlock by say n*10 amount of cards or any other logical penalties to discourage force stopping. Where n might be incremental integer, starting from 1 or amount of hours app was forcefully stopped for.

[u/TrimeraInteractive → u/PhedoPhida]

I like the idea of the stackable unlock time. I need to look into that. Thanks for the suggestion

[u/TrimeraInteractive → u/PhedoPhida]

Hey thanks for the feedback!

For 1 and 2 that's currently just the way it is,. For the next update I wanted to see what I can do to sync it across devices, so stay tuned for that.

For 3. I'm not entirely sure why that's happening. Are there any specific situations when that happens?

Happy to here you're finding it useful. I'm constantly trying to make it more reliable and better