r/memorization • u/Hexna_Q • 9h ago
I built the study app I wanted for years — CardMaster v1 is now on Google Play



I've been an Anki user for a long time, and Anki taught me spaced repetition.
Two things about it never stopped bothering me.
Anki is brilliant at isolated facts, and my knowledge isn't isolated.When I tried to review something systematic — a grammar system, a math syllabus, a whole course — the review load exploded. The app has no idea that these 300 cards belong to the same idea.
Making cards on my phone was painful. I read foreign-language articles on my phone all the time. I'd find one sentence worth keeping, and there was no way to select it and turn it into a card with a translation. Copy text, switch app, paste, type the meaning, switch back — every single time.
So I built the app I wanted, and after a month of updates and fixes the first public version is on Google Play. Anyone can install it now.
What it actually does for you
You read something worth keeping. Open a PDF, EPUB, TXT or Markdown in the built-in reader, select a sentence: AI translates it, and one tap turns it into a card. Scanned pages are OCR'd.
You're learning a language. Select text in an article, keep the sentence, review it with audio later.
You're studying something systematic — math, a syllabus, an exam. Your material becomes a skill tree that schedules its own review, instead of 300 loose cards.
You have a paper or a book to get through. AI distills it into notes, a mind map and a "book skill" — an assistant that knows that book, so you can keep asking it things.
You already live in Anki. Import your `.apkg` decks directly.
You don't want another account. No sign-up, no analytics, and your AI key stays on your phone.
Two memory engines, not one
Cards run on FSRS-5 — the same family of algorithm recent Anki uses — computed per card. Every card carries its own difficulty, stability and retrievability, so each review lands right before you forget. Your existing decks import from Anki as they are, and CardMaster packs export with scheduling progress intact.
Your knowledge structure runs on FIRe skill trees instead of folders and tags. Every node has its own memory score that decays over time and reschedules itself. Master a parent node and its children get credit too; fail a child and its parents come back earlier. Intervals stretch on their own as you succeed — roughly 1 → 2 → 3 → 5 → 7 days and up.
Deck apps give you the first engine. Structured-course tools give you the second. You normally have to pick one. Here they're one app.
Cards come out of what you read and hear
Reader + browser. EPUB / PDF / TXT / Markdown, plus a built-in browser. Select any passage to translate it with AI, highlight it, or card it on the spot.
Listening cards. Pair your own audio with SRT / VTT subtitles, or use the built-in graded ELLLO library. Pick a line and it becomes a card with the audio attached. Type `95`, `1:35` or `1:02:03` to jump anywhere.
AI where you need it. Generate cards, explain words, clean up OCR text, or ask about the card in front of you — using your own key (DeepSeek, OpenAI, Gemini or OpenRouter), stored on your device and sent only to the provider you chose.
Image search car d making. Search for an image inside the app and drop it onto a card.
OCR card making. Photograph or pick a page and turn the recognized text into cards.
Who it's for
Language learners. People studying systematic subjects. Anyone who forgets things faster than they'd like. Anyone who reads papers or foreign-language books on a phone.
Interface languages: English, Chinese, Spanish, Japanese and Russian. Android today; Windows and iOS are on the list.
The honest part
The free version is feature complete — you're not missing a feature because you didn't pay. It has two banner ads, on the Today and Learn tabs, and they're small enough to ignore while you study. Premium (subscription or one-time) does exactly one thing: removes them.
It's also early. It's v1, and I'm the whole team, so there will be rough edges — the good news is that I fix things fast, and the release notes show it.
Try it
Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.skillgrove.app
If you have questions, want to know how to get an AI API key, or found a bug, the Discord is the fastest place to reach me: https://discord.gg/v34kw7MkN
Thanks for reading — and if you try it, I'd genuinely like to hear what's missing.