I've actually been a long time user of Anki and definitely thought about contributing to them. However, I'm personally unfamiliar with their stack and given the simplicity of a flashcard app, it was easier to start here.

However it probably is worth considering an import of Anki cards in the future. For now though, I'm focused on cards with answers you'd only know.

Because Anki's UI could do with a lot of improvement, and it is probably eaiser to separate out the algorithms, the data and the UI.

I'd disagree with you; writing up new UI for anki would be far easier then reinventing the whole wheel. You'd also get anki card support which already is a huge dataset of various flash cards.

If anything new Anki UI project would be more impressive and clearly in demand compared to yet another flash card web app.

> I haven't seen any of these tools doing anything that anki doesn't — why not contribute to it instead?

For the same reason that your area likely has more than 1 pizza restaurant. Other people want to take a stab at their own vision of a thing and that's awesome. Personally, I find Anki to be pretty uninviting to the general public.

Fluent-Forever.com is an example of an application of spaced time learning applied specifically to languages and their app is pretty great.

We may disagree philosophically, and that's ok, but I tend not to buy into the perspective that if X already exists and Y is like X then Y should not exist.

You are comparing apples to oranges here. Starting up a whole new "study group" community is not the same as opening up a pizza restaurant.

I don't mean to be harsh or mean but OP is treating this as a product rather than a hobby projects with producthunt submissions etc. when in reality it's a barebones clone of a standard application that already exists.

Open communities benefit from numbers. Another developer to Anki even if you'd just wrap around nice web ui around it would be significantly more efficient and valuable then reimplementing the same spaced learning logic and starting everything from 0.

The whole point of Anki is to standardize this field - it's libre software made for the medium not for profit.

This is such an odd opinion. The open source world is filled with different implementations of the same idea and while there is a lot of duplication, a lot of good also comes out of it. I'm not sure why somebody making another flashcard program is such an offense to you. I'm not sure why you wouldn't be more supportive of somebody trying his own thing. Competition isn't bad. It's generally a good thing.

Anki is a very big and complex project. From what I've heard and seen, it's a mess and the only person who groks it is the main developer. I get why most people are unwilling to contribute to Anki. I've thought about it myself and I decided against it, preferring to tinker on my own personal flashcard project.

It's also a very old project where it's hard to enact change that you might want. So if you have a different vision, there's no way to realistically implement that.

> Anki is a very big and complex project

But it's not. Just look at the source code for card[1]. It's modern, fully type hinted python3 code, you don't even need to know python to understand big chunk of it.

1 - https://github.com/ankitects/anki/blob/master/pylib/anki/car...

In what way is the Anki project a mess?

I used Anki extensively a few years ago when studying a new language at uni and it helped me a lot, but I just installed it again and not much has changed. It was clunky then and its flaws are showing even more now. Correct me if I’m wrong here, but even something as simple as loading an image from a URL, even though it uses a webview for the cards anyway, simply doesn’t work. Why not take advantage of the web technologies it’s using?

Also, the web client is very bare-bones, unfortunately.

Anki has so many new addon compare couple of years ago and it get updates every week if you test the beta version of the project.