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AnkiDroid (~17 years old) submitted our latest alpha on Sept 03, 2026, 4:40 am. Still pending review.

by david_allison 15d ago

RugnirViking 15d ago
thanks for your app! using it for learning danish and finding it very useful.
- david_allison 15d ago
  Team effort, but thank you!! I've just taken the next month and a half off to work on things full time. I'm excited! The next update won't be huge, (Google required us to make all screens 'edge to edge'[0], which took up most of my time last month). I'm hoping for some solid improvements now that's out the way, once the release pipeline has returned to normal. Feel free to get in touch if you fancy contributing. [0] https://developer.android.com/develop/ui/views/layout/edge-to-edge https://developer.android.com/develop/ui/views/layout/edge-t...
  - fhub 15d ago
    If you can get your agent of choice to run up the app in an emulator and navigate the whole thing taking screenshots then tasks like edge-to-edge can be pretty hands off. The way I did it was to firstly get accessibility identifiers on everything. Then have it record everything I do on an emulator to navigate the entire app. Then left it for a while to work out how to actually use the app via the emulator. Once you have this sort of baseline. A lot of changes are really quite pleasant. I often ask for an HTML gallery of screenshots covering a few device sizes as the step before I bother running it on a device myself.
    - david_allison 15d ago
      We use Roborazzi[0], which is an excellent screenshot library, but: * We target minSdk 24 * We're still using XML views * We target a large variety of form factors * We have a lot of screens, and these have a lot of configuration options. I really wish it was "point an agent at it, and walk away", but many screens ended up being hours of iteration with Fable driving my phone/an emulator to produce an acceptable outcome. Given that my Pixel 9 Pro has system screens which are still broken under edge to edge, it's not an easy change, and takes up time which could have been going towards feature development. [0] https://github.com/takahirom/roborazzi/ https://github.com/takahirom/roborazzi/
      - voakbasda 15d ago
        Gotta love that Google enforces rules on developers that it won’t even enforce on itself. Such a great look.
      - xethos 15d ago
        A tangent, but a big thank you (to you, and all other developers) for supporting older API levels from someone with devices ranging from Android 8.1 (BlackBerry Key2LE, at minSdk 27) to Android 16 (BlackBerry "Q25", at minSdk 36.1) <3
        david_allison 15d ago
        Thank you!! E-waste is awful, as is cutting off old devices. We still backport security fixes to minSdk 21. To Google's credit, post-21 is a much more pleasant experience and requires very little developer time. API desugaring[0] has worked perfectly, their compatibility classes[1] handle most of the common cases, and there's often very little to actually code[2]. [0] https://developer.android.com/studio/write/java8-support-table https://developer.android.com/studio/write/java8-support-tab... [1] https://developer.android.com/jetpack/androidx/releases/appcompat https://developer.android.com/jetpack/androidx/releases/appc... [2] https://github.com/ankidroid/Anki-Android/blob/main/compat/src/main/java/com/ichi2/anki/compat/Compat.kt https://github.com/ankidroid/Anki-Android/blob/main/compat/s...
jbaber 15d ago
Thank you for Ankidroid!
AstralSerenity 15d ago
You guys are awesome, thank you.
ryantgtg 15d ago
We have about a 16 year old app, and our Google Play app review consistently takes between 30 minutes to 1 hour. Apple consistently takes about 36 hours for us.
IshKebab 15d ago
Yeah you'd think they could use some kind of exponential back-off type algorithm for apps that have been successfully reviewed many times... :-D
yjftsjthsd-h 15d ago
Is that 2.24.1 which was successfully published on F-Droid on Sept 2? If so that's... Interesting. And useful.
- david_allison 15d ago
  Google Play rejected our 2.24.1 release (Aug 31). F-Droid is typically slower, but we don't have to worry about distribution issues. This is regarding 2.25.0alpha4.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 15d ago
    Thanks for clarifying. Yeah, I expected F-Droid to be slower... Though I feel like outright rejection is worse.

AnkiDroid (~17 years old) submitted our latest alpha on Sept 03, 2026, 4:40 am. Still pending review.

RugnirViking 15d ago

thanks for your app! using it for learning danish and finding it very useful.

david_allison 15d ago
Team effort, but thank you!! I've just taken the next month and a half off to work on things full time. I'm excited! The next update won't be huge, (Google required us to make all screens 'edge to edge'[0], which took up most of my time last month). I'm hoping for some solid improvements now that's out the way, once the release pipeline has returned to normal. Feel free to get in touch if you fancy contributing. [0] https://developer.android.com/develop/ui/views/layout/edge-to-edge https://developer.android.com/develop/ui/views/layout/edge-t...
- fhub 15d ago
  If you can get your agent of choice to run up the app in an emulator and navigate the whole thing taking screenshots then tasks like edge-to-edge can be pretty hands off. The way I did it was to firstly get accessibility identifiers on everything. Then have it record everything I do on an emulator to navigate the entire app. Then left it for a while to work out how to actually use the app via the emulator. Once you have this sort of baseline. A lot of changes are really quite pleasant. I often ask for an HTML gallery of screenshots covering a few device sizes as the step before I bother running it on a device myself.
  - david_allison 15d ago
    We use Roborazzi[0], which is an excellent screenshot library, but: * We target minSdk 24 * We're still using XML views * We target a large variety of form factors * We have a lot of screens, and these have a lot of configuration options. I really wish it was "point an agent at it, and walk away", but many screens ended up being hours of iteration with Fable driving my phone/an emulator to produce an acceptable outcome. Given that my Pixel 9 Pro has system screens which are still broken under edge to edge, it's not an easy change, and takes up time which could have been going towards feature development. [0] https://github.com/takahirom/roborazzi/ https://github.com/takahirom/roborazzi/
    - voakbasda 15d ago
      Gotta love that Google enforces rules on developers that it won’t even enforce on itself. Such a great look.
    - xethos 15d ago
      A tangent, but a big thank you (to you, and all other developers) for supporting older API levels from someone with devices ranging from Android 8.1 (BlackBerry Key2LE, at minSdk 27) to Android 16 (BlackBerry "Q25", at minSdk 36.1) <3
      - david_allison 15d ago
        Thank you!! E-waste is awful, as is cutting off old devices. We still backport security fixes to minSdk 21. To Google's credit, post-21 is a much more pleasant experience and requires very little developer time. API desugaring[0] has worked perfectly, their compatibility classes[1] handle most of the common cases, and there's often very little to actually code[2]. [0] https://developer.android.com/studio/write/java8-support-table https://developer.android.com/studio/write/java8-support-tab... [1] https://developer.android.com/jetpack/androidx/releases/appcompat https://developer.android.com/jetpack/androidx/releases/appc... [2] https://github.com/ankidroid/Anki-Android/blob/main/compat/src/main/java/com/ichi2/anki/compat/Compat.kt https://github.com/ankidroid/Anki-Android/blob/main/compat/s...

jbaber 15d ago

Thank you for Ankidroid!

AstralSerenity 15d ago

You guys are awesome, thank you.

ryantgtg 15d ago

We have about a 16 year old app, and our Google Play app review consistently takes between 30 minutes to 1 hour. Apple consistently takes about 36 hours for us.

IshKebab 15d ago

Yeah you'd think they could use some kind of exponential back-off type algorithm for apps that have been successfully reviewed many times... :-D

yjftsjthsd-h 15d ago

Is that 2.24.1 which was successfully published on F-Droid on Sept 2? If so that's... Interesting. And useful.

david_allison 15d ago
Google Play rejected our 2.24.1 release (Aug 31). F-Droid is typically slower, but we don't have to worry about distribution issues. This is regarding 2.25.0alpha4.
- yjftsjthsd-h 15d ago
  Thanks for clarifying. Yeah, I expected F-Droid to be slower... Though I feel like outright rejection is worse.