I use Anki for more than a decade, and every single time there is a touch of frustration that Anki UX stuck in mid-2000.
Another super annoying feature is that historically Anki is free except iOS – somehow mentality of "iOS users are rich" sneaked in – and Anki for iOS costs ~25$. This makes it prohibitively hard to recommend Anki to non-Android users, especially to younger generation which virtually don't use desktops, type much faster on mobile rather then PC keyboard, etc.
This is just not true. The android app is an open source project by the community, whereas the iOS app is made by the original developer of anki.
It's "subsidized" by iOS purchases I believe.
Regardless of the reason behind it, you’re right, it is admittedly hard to convince a large portion of iOS users that $25 for an app is worth it, which is unfortunate for Anki. But I don’t know if a free version would be worth the trade-offs.
Anki UX just sucks. I agree. Even if it were year 2000, its UX is not great.
iOS users spend an order of magnitude more money than Android users, so that was the creator's logic - use them as the "whales".
It's 100% fine and honestly he should be charging a subscription for such a great app, on every platform.
Back then when I was using Nokia N900, I made PyQT version of Anki for Maemo platform, but I reused some of the python code of Anki, instead of reimplementing it from scratch. I'm still thinking about creating open standard/ecosystem for flash card and space-repeititon software, but it'll take ton of focus and person-time to do right.
(I also question whether there are really a significant number of people who type -- at least Latin characters -- faster on mobile than a PC keyboard, but that's a digression)