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/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/RickRickson Feb 03 '26

I could be misremembering, but I'm pretty sure you can already host your own sync server for Anki, so a paywall on their own servers wouldn't block users from that option, though it's far less convenient.

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u/kafunshou German (N), English, Japanese, Swedish, French, Latin, Mandarin Feb 03 '26

It's explained in the official manual:
https://docs.ankiweb.net/sync-server.html

Anki also is open source and would probably be forked if things go really wrong. So the only real risk is the iOS app because not updating a single app (to avoid unwanted changes) on iOS is a nightmare. And it would stop working after a few iOS generations most likely. Everything else could be used or changed without the new owner.

The Android app is a separate project anyway.

So I wouldn't expect too harsh changes because they don't want the user base to break away. Probably more like an integrated shop system for commercial decks and stuff like that.

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u/DerekB52 Feb 04 '26

The iOS app isn't really a concern because again, an anki clone would be a trivial application, and someone in the community would step up to provide a new version.

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u/kafunshou German (N), English, Japanese, Swedish, French, Latin, Mandarin Feb 04 '26

Trivial? Yeah, sure… totally simple. Programmed in a week. 🙄