AnkiDroid User Manual

The big blue + button in the bottom right corner is used to add new material to AnkiDroid. Pressing it expands to give the following four options, which are also described in the tutorial video (except for 'Create filtered deck').

At the top of each screen in AnkiDroid is the App Bar, with buttons for performing various actions. The following actions are available from the app bar in the deck list:

Hint: long tapping on a button in the app bar anywhere in the app will display a textual hint describing what the button does!

To study the cards in a deck, simply tap on the deck name (or the "STUDY" button on a 10" tablet), and AnkiDroid will switch to study mode.

Note that the currently selected deck is highlighted with a grey background, and if you have any filtered decks they will be highlighted using a blue font. Filtered decks are discussed elsewhere in the manual.

Long tapping on a deck will show a list of other actions available to perform on that deck:

Some additional actions are located in the overflow menu for less common tasks, which are summarized below:

Next to each deck, three numbers are displayed. The left, blue number, corresponds to how many new cards you have to learn today. Anki will introduce 20 new cards a day by default, and you can customize this number if you’d like. The red number in the middle is for the cards due to be studied today which are currently in the learning phase, and the green number is the cards which are due for review (i.e. cards which have already graduated from the learning phase). On a deck you’ve never studied before, these numbers will both be zero.

As explained above, tapping on the counts will take you to the deck overview screen.

The icons that are shown in the app bar depend on whether your deck is an ordinary deck or a filtered deck.

If you have not used Anki on a computer before, you may like to have a look at the first intro video before reading on, as it explains the basic review process.

On the top left of the screen you’ll see three numbers. From the left, these correspond to new cards, learning cards, and cards to review. These are explained in more detail in the intro videos for the desktop program, so please check them out if you haven’t already.

When you’ve looked at a card’s question and remembered the answer, or decided you don’t know it, tap the show answer button. When you do, the bottom area will change to display 2-4 answer buttons, depending on how you’ve answered the card previously. The buttons will display the time a card will next be shown, so 10m means "10 minutes" and "5d" means "5 days". You can tap directly on these buttons to choose a particular answer.

To make reviewing faster, you can configure gestures (for example taps and swipes) to answer cards without using the buttons. See the preferences section for more information on configuring gestures.

The App Bar at the top of the study screen has several buttons for performing various common actions. The number of buttons which are shown is determined automatically by Android based on the size and resolution of your screen. If there is not enough space to show the button for a given action, then the action will be available from the menu instead. If you are unsure what a button does, you can long-tap on it to see the name of the action. The following action are available:

When you’ve finished the cards that are due to be studied today, you’ll be taken back to the decks list and shown a congratulations message. From here you can select a different deck, or if you’ve finished studying for the day, you can simply tap the home button in order to close AnkiDroid (and you can also do this in the middle of reviews if you wish).

If you wish to keep studying the same deck further, tap on the deck again which will give you several options for continued study. Please see the filtered deck section for more on custom study.

The note formatting toolbar contains basic text formatting buttons (Bold, Italic, Underline, Horizontal Line, Insert Title, Change Font Size, Insert MathJax and Insert Cloze Deletion).

It also allows the addition of user-defined toolbar buttons using HTML. HTML is a powerful language allowing nearly endless customization of your cards. Our wiki contains common code samples to get you started.

A user-defined toolbar button can be removed by long pressing the button and selecting "Delete".

AnkiDroid supports all the search strings that the desktop version of Anki does, allowing you to perform quite complex searches. Some examples:

For a full list of the possibilities, please see the section in the desktop manual.

Alternatively, some more commonly used filters (marked, suspended, and tagged cards) can be quickly applied without manually typing them by choosing them from the overflow menu. You can also save and recall common search queries from the menu.

Fields can be marked as RTL (currently possible only from Anki Desktop) for RTL editing. When a field is marked as RTL, then the text is right-aligned in editing fields and punctuation is correctly displayed at the end (left) of sentences. Text that contains blocks of LTR characters will be properly displayed as well, with the beginning of the sentence appearing to the right of the LTR block and the end of the sentence being displayed to the left of the LTR block.

Directionality is especially important for editing and creating RTL cloze deletions as the cloze format includes both neutral and LTR markup characters. Therefore it is recommended to use a separate note type for LTR cloze deletions and RTL cloze deletions.

To display a field as RTL, with proper right-alignment and directionality (punctuation at left of sentences, proper flow around LTR blocks), the field should be wrapped in a div or span element with the RTL directionality specified:

Before you can use AnkiWeb, you’ll first need to create an account by visiting https://ankiweb.net and clicking the Sign Up button. If you have used AnkiWeb in the past, you can skip this step. After signing up, see the corresponding instructions below, depending on whether you are trying to get your existing decks into AnkiDroid or out of AnkiDroid.

If you don’t have regular internet access, it’s still possible to copy decks back and forth to your device, by using USB.

The USB method works by importing or exporting all your decks at once. This means that unlike syncing via AnkiWeb, you can’t make changes from two locations at once and then merge them. Instead, if you wish to add cards on the desktop, you need to make sure you export the latest version of your collection from your mobile device first, or you’ll end up losing any reviews done on the mobile device.

Thus the workflow you would typically use is to export your collection from your mobile device and import it into the desktop, make modifications on the desktop, and then export your collection and import it back into your mobile device.

AnkiDroid can’t directly import text files. If you wish to do that, you’ll need to do that with the desktop program, and then import your collection into AnkiDroid.

Apkg files are automatically associated with AnkiDroid, so for example if you open a .apkg email attachment which you sent to yourself, then AnkiDroid will automatically open the file and confirm if you want to import it. Simply click OK and the apkg file will be imported.

You can also manually import .apkg files as follows:

This is not officially supported, but .anki2 files can manually be imported if needed, in cases of troubleshooting for example:

When exporting for use in Anki Desktop, you generally want to export your entire collection, including all your review history etc.

From the main menu in the decks screen:

To import the file on your computer:

If you want to share a deck in AnkiDroid with another user, you can export a deck package.

From the main menu in the decks screen:

These are the general settings which affect the whole app:

The reviewing screen allows you to customize how AnkiDroid behaves when you’re reviewing cards. Note that only the reviewing settings which are applied to all decks are shown here. There are more settings related to reviewing which are deck specific. These deck specific settings are located in Deck options.

AnkiDroid allows you to customize the interface, so that actions you perform frequently can be accomplished quickly by using tap and swipe gestures.

Some less common features for advanced users are shown here

Mathjax is a modern typesetting library for math and chemistry. AnkiDroid supports Mathjax cards out of the box. Mathjax is configured to expect TeX formatting, with \( and \) delimiting inline equations and \[ and \] for display equations.

To try it out, enter the following into a field:

…​ \(\sqrt{x}\) …​

and preview the card.

For more details, see Mathjax Support in the Anki Manual.

Previous workarounds are no longer necessary as of AnkiDroid 2.9.

The Anki system has built-in note types which allow you to review cards in both directions. When creating new material in AnkiDroid, you should choose one of these note types, such as "Basic (and reversed card)", which will automatically generate a reverse card for you.

If you used the wrong note type when adding your material, you can change the note type via the edit note screen, or you can change the note type for multiple cards at once using the browser in Anki Desktop. To do this, follow the instructions in the syncing with Anki Desktop section, then in Anki Desktop open the browser, select the cards you want to change, then choose Change note type from the menu.

Alternatively, if your cards are using a custom card layout which doesn’t include a reverse card, you can edit the note type to include a reverse card by following the instructions in the reverse cards section of the Anki Desktop user manual. While less convenient than using Anki Desktop, it is possible to edit the note type from directly within AnkiDroid as well; see the custom card layout section for more on this.

AnkiDroid allows you to use non-system fonts on your cards. To set them up properly, it is strongly recommended to use the official method that is used by Anki Desktop. Please see the corresponding section in the desktop manual for more information.

Please note that AnkiDroid has to load the entire font into memory in order to use it, and fonts for Asian languages can be quite large. If you have an older device and notice AnkiDroid crashing frequently after installing a font, you may have exceeded your device’s memory limits. For Google Noto, it’s not recommended to use the combined CJK font, rather get the individual languages separately from here.

Note 1: If you have "Fetch media on sync" disabled, you may need to manually copy the font file from Anki Desktop to your AnkiDroid/collection.media folder.

Note 2: If you can’t get your font to work after following the steps in here and the Anki Desktop manual, please refer to the FAQ for detailed steps on how to debug font issues.

The layout of flashcards is completely customizable, although this is an advanced topic with a fairly steep learning curve, and you will probably find it a lot more convenient to do the customization with Anki Desktop.

The card templates section of the Anki Desktop manual has detailed instructions on how to edit note types, and most of the actions discussed there are also available from AnkiDroid by tapping "cards" at the bottom of the note editor, or choosing the "manage note types" option in the deck picker. Since detailed information on customizing card layouts is available in the Anki desktop manual, it will not be repeated here.

There is an advanced formatting page on the AnkiDroid wiki with various hints on how you can get the most out of your card formatting, and we encourage you to read it, and edit it freely if you have any tips that you’d like to share with the community.

AnkiDroid allows you to type in the correct answer and then compare it to the right answer. You have to set this up with Anki desktop, as described in the Anki Desktop manual.

Anki desktop replaces the “{{type:NN}}” field on the front of a card with an input box in the card. On AnkiDroid it is replaced with a “…​…​” prompt instead, and a text input box is shown at the bottom. The comparison between typed text and the correct text is shown on the answer side in place of the “{{type:NN}}” field there, like on Anki desktop.

The text input box and the soft keyboard can be hidden by ticking “Disable typing in answer” in the preferences.

Even with typing disabled, the correct answer is shown on the answer side. This is done on purpose; otherwise the correct answer might not be shown at all.

To hide the comparison (e.g. because the correct answer is shown anyway), the HTML id “typeans” can be used. Add “.mobile #typeans {display: none;}” to the card styling using Anki Desktop.

The type answer prompt and the comparison have more classes that can be used to change the way they are displayed. Some of these are the same as on Anki Desktop, some are specific to AnkiDroid.

The comparison uses three classes, typeGood, typeBad and typeMissed to add green, red and gray background to the typing comparison. These three classes are used on Anki desktop as well.

The “…​…​” prompt has the class “typePrompt”.

When typing is set to off in the preferences, the class “typeOff” is added to the prompt on the question side, and to the div element containing the comparison on the answer side. This class can be used to show the type prompt or to hide the typing comparison in this case.

AnkiDroid has an in Automatic Language Selection feature in the Note Editor starting with AnkiDroid 2.13. This feature allows you to define a default language to be used in your keyboard for a field in a note type.

For example, if you have Russian and English note fields, and your keyboard supports the setImeHintLocales Android API, the keyboard layout will switch to Russian in the first field and back to English in the second automatically when the fields get focus. Checkout video reference for demonstration