- 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
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 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.
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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...
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.
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.
Overall this doesn't inspire much confidence in how solid and tested the procedure is.
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?
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.
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.
On that page though, the same issues are present. The pip install does not make use of any lock file.
pip install anki
SYNC_USER1=user:pass ~/syncserver/bin/python -m anki.syncserver
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.
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.