AnkiDroid Flashcards - Android

[Kira Yamato]

Hi,

This is my first time checking out this Anki app. What is the Android app
and the web version about? Are they from the same company? What is the
revenue model? Are they all free? If yes, what is the catch? Will the users
compromise anything like the privacy?

I look forward to hearing from you. Thank you.

[Eginhard]

Hi,

thanks for your questions. The Desktop, Web and iOS versions are all developed by the same developer. The Anki Desktop code is available on GitHub under the AGPL3 Licence. All versions are free, except AnkiMobile for iOS, which can be purchased for $24.99, which is the revenue source for the Anki developer and also covers running costs of e.g. the AnkiWeb servers (see also https://anki.tenderapp.com/kb/anki-ecosystem/why-does-ankimobile-cost-more-than-a-typical-mobile-app)

AnkiDroid (which is supported in this group here) is the only version that is developed independently by a separate community of developers in their free time. It's also free and open-source, the code is available on GitHub under the GPL3 Licence.

You can see the AnkiWeb privacy policy here. However, you're not required to create an AnkiWeb account to use any version of Anki (except AnkiWeb) and in that case all your information is only stored on your own device and not accessible to anybody else.

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[Kira Yamato]

Hi,

Thanks for the reply.

In this case, will the Android app leak/share my data to those independent developers' servers if I use solely the Android app or sync it with the web version?

Is the Android app acknowledged by the original web developer as safe to be used?

[Eginhard]

Yes, there is close collaboration with the Anki developer and AnkiDroid is linked from the official Anki download page: http://ankisrs.net/index.html#download

AnkiDroid does not have any servers of its own. If you don't sync, the app data is not shared with anybody else. If you choose to sync with AnkiWeb (hosted by the Anki developer), your data is subject to the privacy policy I linked to above. For more specific questions about that I suggest to ask in the official Anki forum: https://anki.tenderapp.com/discussions

In case you don't want your Anki data shared with anybody at all, but still want to synchronise between different Anki versions, you could also host your own server. There is a custom, open-source implementation and instructions available here: https://github.com/dsnopek/anki-sync-server

On Sat, Dec 31, 2016 at 1:20 PM, Kira Yamato <kirana...@hotmail.com> wrote:

Hi,

Thanks for the reply.

In this case, will the Android app leak/share my data to those independent developers' servers if I use solely the Android app or sync it with the web version?

Is the Android app acknowledged by the original web developer as safe to be used?

On 31 December 2016 9:05:57 p.m. Eginhard <enno.hermann+ankidroid@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi,

thanks for your questions. The Desktop, Web and iOS versions are all developed by the same developer. The Anki Desktop code is available on GitHub under the AGPL3 Licence. All versions are free, except AnkiMobile for iOS, which can be purchased for $24.99, which is the revenue source for the Anki developer and also covers running costs of e.g. the AnkiWeb servers (see also https://anki.tenderapp.com/kb/anki-ecosystem/why-does-ankimobile-cost-more-than-a-typical-mobile-app)

AnkiDroid (which is supported in this group here) is the only version that is developed independently by a separate community of developers in their free time. It's also free and open-source, the code is available on GitHub under the GPL3 Licence.

You can see the AnkiWeb privacy policy here. However, you're not required to create an AnkiWeb account to use any version of Anki (except AnkiWeb) and in that case all your information is only stored on your own device and not accessible to anybody else.

On Sat, Dec 31, 2016 at 12:05 PM, Kira Yamato <kirana...@hotmail.com> wrote:

Hi,

This is my first time checking out this Anki app. What is the Android app
and the web version about? Are they from the same company? What is the
revenue model? Are they all free? If yes, what is the catch? Will the users
compromise anything like the privacy?

I look forward to hearing from you. Thank you.


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[Tim]

While we take user's privacy very seriously, and would never knowingly allow their data to be sent anywhere without their permission, from a security perspective it's not hugely useful to ask us if you can trust us ;) You can either chose to believe us, inspect the source code yourself, or you could use a third party app to block AnkiDroid from accessing the internet.

On Saturday, December 31, 2016 at 10:33:24 PM UTC+9, Eginhard wrote:

Yes, there is close collaboration with the Anki developer and AnkiDroid is linked from the official Anki download page: http://ankisrs.net/index.html#download

AnkiDroid does not have any servers of its own. If you don't sync, the app data is not shared with anybody else. If you choose to sync with AnkiWeb (hosted by the Anki developer), your data is subject to the privacy policy I linked to above. For more specific questions about that I suggest to ask in the official Anki forum: https://anki.tenderapp.com/discussions

In case you don't want your Anki data shared with anybody at all, but still want to synchronise between different Anki versions, you could also host your own server. There is a custom, open-source implementation and instructions available here: https://github.com/dsnopek/anki-sync-server

On Sat, Dec 31, 2016 at 1:20 PM, Kira Yamato wrote:

Hi,

Thanks for the reply.

In this case, will the Android app leak/share my data to those independent developers' servers if I use solely the Android app or sync it with the web version?

Is the Android app acknowledged by the original web developer as safe to be used?

On 31 December 2016 9:05:57 p.m. Eginhard <enno.hermann+ankidroid@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi,

thanks for your questions. The Desktop, Web and iOS versions are all developed by the same developer. The Anki Desktop code is available on GitHub under the AGPL3 Licence. All versions are free, except AnkiMobile for iOS, which can be purchased for $24.99, which is the revenue source for the Anki developer and also covers running costs of e.g. the AnkiWeb servers (see also https://anki.tenderapp.com/kb/anki-ecosystem/why-does-ankimobile-cost-more-than-a-typical-mobile-app)

AnkiDroid (which is supported in this group here) is the only version that is developed independently by a separate community of developers in their free time. It's also free and open-source, the code is available on GitHub under the GPL3 Licence.

You can see the AnkiWeb privacy policy here. However, you're not required to create an AnkiWeb account to use any version of Anki (except AnkiWeb) and in that case all your information is only stored on your own device and not accessible to anybody else.

On Sat, Dec 31, 2016 at 12:05 PM, Kira Yamato wrote:

Hi,

This is my first time checking out this Anki app. What is the Android app
and the web version about? Are they from the same company? What is the
revenue model? Are they all free? If yes, what is the catch? Will the users
compromise anything like the privacy?

I look forward to hearing from you. Thank you.


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[Mark Carter]

On Sunday, 1 January 2017 16:56:53 UTC+7, Tim wrote:

While we take user's privacy very seriously...

 Is it still the case that the AnkiDroid folder location is forced to be on External Storage. This is a major privacy concern IMHO.  Even requiring EXTERNAL_STORAGE permission is an unnecessary privacy concern on Android 6.0+.

[Tim]

I was focusing on the privacy side of us as an "organization" not taking any personal information from our users. 

In terms of local security of data (i.e. protecting against other apps trying to steal your data); as with all areas of development we rely on pull requests from volunteer developers to stay up to date with the latest APIs and development practices. I agree that our current storage model is quite ancient, and there is a lot of room for improvement, but there are also conflicting requirements in terms of supporting down to Android 2.3, and this drastically increases the amount of work required. Basically all of the current core developers have our hands full simply reviewing pull requests, fixing the occasional serious bug, and providing support, so at the moment most "new" functionality is coming from the wider community.

We did actually have a setting in the past for storing the collection on the system partition, but it seems nobody was using it, as AFAIK nobody complained when we removed the setting. The system partition has limited disk capacity compared with the user partition, so IMO it's not really suitable for AnkiDroid where a user's collection will routinely go into the hundreds or thousands of MB territory. Anki Desktop (unix versions) also does not store the user data in the root partition, so it would be a bit weird if we were to do this. Adding support for file based encryption might be a better strategy for security.

[Mark Carter]

Thank you for your response Tim.

I wouldn't suggest forcing the AnkiDroid location to anywhere in particular, but rather giving the user the option. I'm not sure why people didn't use that option before. Maybe it was buried.

I'm pretty sure (though I'm very happy to be corrected) that, for many devices (such as the Nexus 6P), the internal and external storage uses the same partition. In other words, in such cases, space-wise it makes no difference where you store the data.  What might be a solution is to default to internal storage and ask the user if they want to choose an external location (using the SAF) instead (potentially for space reasons, or survival of data beyond Clear Data/Uninstall).  You might need to check whether an SAF-selected folder (e.g. /sdcard/AnkiDroid) would also survive ClearData/Uninstall, because I'm not sure it is.

Also, it might be worth adding some analytics (if you haven't already done so) to gather stats on the db sizes out there (maybe as a percentage of available space too). I imagine that most don't get to the 100MB+ territory.

[Tim]

Yes my Nexus 5x appears to have system and user on the same partition, but my last Sony Xperia device for example didn't.

We would definitely welcome a PR to modernize our storage approach. I think it would require quite a lot of work, so I wouldn't expect it to come from any of the "core" developers any time soon unfortunately. Your suggestion to let the user specify where they want to put the AnkiDroid folder would be best, I think there's even an issue open for that from years ago.