Etch
Or on a timer, or when you open your timewaster app of choice. Nothing due, nothing pops — and it stays quiet in landscape, on a call, and while something's playing. Real spaced repetition, on Android, on-device, yours forever.
Free to start · Ready-made decks · Powered by FSRS · Local-first, no account
Etch is a flashcard app for remembering things — world capitals, the Greek gods, a painting and its artist, a symphony from its opening bars. It shows you each card right before you'd forget it — that's spaced repetition, the method that makes things stick.
Start with a ready-made deck, make your own, or import from another app. The twist: instead of waiting for you to open a study app, the cards come to you — or sit down for a full session whenever you want to go deeper.
Made for curious learners — from the endlessly curious to exam-takers to Anki users who want a cleaner, more intuitive workflow.
Opening Instagram for the fifth time today? Answer a card first. Free picks one app and shows one card when you open it. Pro watches as many apps as you like, several cards at a time, on your own timing — which is the run shown here.
Not sure what to make? Browse a library of 71 ready-made decks — 3,174 cards, 63 of the decks free — and start learning in one tap: history, geography, science, programming, the arts, business, and English language skills.
Cover parts of a diagram, map, or screenshot, then tap to reveal what's underneath — anatomy, a wiring diagram, the countries on a map.
Reviewing right before you'd forget is one of the best-established findings in memory science. Etch uses FSRS, a modern spaced-repetition algorithm, to time each card for your target retention.
Etch reads your .apkg files and carries your FSRS
scheduling and progress across, so cards land where you left them in
Anki. You stay in control of the details: map every field to
the front, the answer, or extra context, and image-occlusion
notetypes come across as real occlusion cards — Anki's
one-note-per-mask becomes one Etch card per image. Same content, fewer
rows, and Etch shows you the maths.
Audio and images come across too. Formatting is normalised to Etch's
own clean type, so a deck built from a dozen notetypes finally reads
consistently. The rare thing it can't fully translate — LaTeX
math (not rendered yet), a missing media file, a card whose FSRS state
won't parse — is flagged with a count at import, never dropped
silently. And your data isn't trapped: export any time, with
.etch keeping everything (media, scheduling, folders) and
CSV carrying the text. There's no .apkg export yet, so
plan the move as one-way for now.
No account. No Etch server. No cloud sync. No ads, no Firebase, no third-party analytics SDK. Your cards, your media and your review history live in private storage on your phone, and Etch never syncs them anywhere.
Optional crash and usage reporting goes to Sentry. In the public release it is off by default — one toggle in Settings → Privacy turns it on. Beta builds report automatically and carry no in-app opt-out; testers are told before they join. Google Play is also asked what you own each time the app launches, so your purchase works, and Android's own system backup can copy your library to your Google Drive. Every event is named and itemised in the policy. Read the full privacy policy →
One-time. Lifetime.
The free tier is a complete flashcard app. Pro adds depth.
$0
$14.99 once
$29.99 once
Already have Pro? The Supporter upgrade is $15, not another $29.99.
Everything you buy is yours forever. Nothing you buy once will ever move to a subscription.
I'll email once, when v1 hits the Play Store. No newsletter. No marketing.
Get notified at launch