Duolingo’s Tinycards comes to Android

The popular language learning service Duolingo today announced that Tinycards, it flashcards app, is now available on Android. Tinycards, which marked Duolingo’s first foray beyond its flagship language learning service, launched as an iOS-only app in 2016 and came to the web in 2017.

Duolingo says that its users have already created more than 200,000 custom flashcard decks that cover anything from world geography to art history, Game of Thrones characters and Pokémon. Like similar apps, Tinycards makes use of the spaced repetition technique to help its users learn, though it also uses some of the same algorithms as Duolingo to adapt to users’ progress.

Given its large international reach, Duolingo’s user base has always leaned toward Android, and it came as a bit of a surprise that the company would launch Tinycards as an iOS-only app. It’s taken the company more than a year to bring the app to Android, but in return, Android users now immediately get access to a far larger library than their friends on iOS, who had to start with only a few dozen card stacks.

Why did it take the team so long to launch the Android app? “We have a relatively small team, and the overall team’s main focus is on Duolingo, which is why it took us longer to launch Tinycards on Android,” a spokesperson told me. “Also, great Android developers are pretty hard to find!”

Looking ahead, the Tinycards team plans to launch localized version in Spanish and Portuguese in September.