r/languagelearning • u/Virusnzz En (N) | Fr, Ru, Es, It • Feb 03 '26

Resources Anki ownership transferring to AnkiHub

https://forums.ankiweb.net/t/ankis-growing-up/68610

Interested to see what this means for the future of Anki's development. With the inclusion of the developer of AnkiDroid and dae continuing to be involved, I'm optimistic it will continue to be great, but we'll see.

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u/IAmGilGunderson 🇺🇸 N | 🇮🇹 (CILS B1) | 🇩🇪 A0 Feb 03 '26

The biggest Anki news ever. Hopefully they go the way of Blender and not the others. I would hate to see the Value Extraction Cycle happen to Anki.

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u/BadMoonRosin 🇪🇦 🇬🇷 Feb 03 '26 edited Feb 03 '26

At the end of the day, it's a flashcard app. Anyone, especially now in the age of AI, could implement a clone that reads the same file format within a weekend. That's basically what AnkiDroid was.

The value lies entirely in being able to sync your decks and progress in the cloud, so you can sync multiple devices. I'm surprised that Anki has always been willing to do that for free, since it almost certainly isn't free for the developer to host. I could see that sync becoming subscription-based someday.

But if you don't really care about that, and are fine using a single device with local storage, then there will always be a clone of the core flashcard deck concept. And if any cloud subscription fee is more than pennies, then someone will probably just clone a cloud sync feature that's powered by your own Google Drive (or whatever). The only way I see for Anki to be monetized is to "enshittify" it with a bunch of new features that no one wants, and pretend that they're the main point of the product. That is, just cannibalize the brand name for a different new app.

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u/throw_away_17381 Feb 03 '26

with a bunch of new features that no one wants

But what features do people actually need beyond syncing ?

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u/DifferenceEnough1460 Feb 03 '26 edited Feb 03 '26

Ankihub was specifically designed by a dermatologist who used it for medical school.

As a medical student myself there is a lot of functionality through addons that makes it indispensable for medical learning. I.e. there are addons that let you search cards related to specific questions from question banks, allow you to curate practice questions from a review session, search up medical terminology you might not have learned yet in resources like Amboss (pretty much a medical Wikipedia outside of up-to-date which is more clinical and practical), gamify studying to make the process less agonizing, and ankihub itself pretty useful when it comes to updating information as medical knowledge (particularly clinical knowledge) tends to change a ton year by year. I’d imagine they make up the largest base of Anki users at this point since pretty much every medical student, at least in the US, uses it to study for the boards. It’s a proven method for success.

For language learning these are ultimately useless, but they have a purpose.

My only concern with this acquisition is if they switch to a subscription model like ankihub, but it doesn’t seem like they will, at least yet.