Anki is the benchmark for serious spaced repetition, and for good reason: it is powerful and deeply customisable, and it offers FSRS as an optional scheduler alongside the older SM-2 method. But “best flashcard app” is not one question. The app that wins on a desktop is not automatically the one that wins in the ten minutes you have on a bus.
This article is about that second question: what makes a flashcard app work on a phone. If you are comparing features in general, our full Anki comparison covers the wider picture. Here, the lens is mobile.
What actually matters on mobile
On a phone, review happens in fragments — a queue, a commute, a few minutes before sleep. That changes the requirements.
1. Offline first. Signal drops in tunnels, on planes and in old buildings. An app that needs the network to show a card fails exactly when you finally have the time. EnjoyCards is built offline-first: your cards live in a local database, and reviews are written locally and synced later.
2. One-handed sessions. You review with a thumb, not a mouse. That means large rating buttons, a clear prompt and no fiddly targets. EnjoyCards shows the next interval (10m, 2d, 15d) on each rating button, so a thumb-tap is a decision, not a guess.
3. Sync that does not double-count. You review on the phone in the morning and the tablet at night. Every review carries a unique ID, so a sync that drops and retries never counts a card twice.
4. Card creation that does not require typing. Nobody wants to type 300 words on a phone keyboard. Two shortcuts matter: an AI flashcard maker that turns one word into a finished card, and a batch mode where you paste a word list and the cards generate in the background — with progress shown, cancellable, and resumable if interrupted. This is the difference between building a deck on your phone and only ever reviewing one built somewhere else.
5. A working undo button. On a small screen, mis-taps happen. A clean undo (Ctrl/Cmd + Z) drops a wrong rating instead of leaving your schedule skewed.
A mobile-focused comparison
| Mobile need | EnjoyCards | Anki | Quizlet |
|---|---|---|---|
| Offline review on a phone | Yes, offline-first | Desktop-first heritage | Limited |
| Interval preview on rating buttons | Yes | Yes | No |
| Create a card from one word | AI-generated card | Manual entry | AI assist |
| Paste a word list, generate a deck | Batch mode, background job | Manual | Manual |
| Sync across phone, tablet, desktop | Yes, idempotent review IDs | Available | Web-first |
| Setup to first review | Near zero | Steep | Easy |
| Scheduling | FSRS | FSRS or SM-2 | Leitner-style |
Two honest caveats. First, Anki’s depth is real and unmatched: if you want to tune scheduler parameters and import large community decks, nothing here replaces that. Second, Quizlet’s strength is class sets and shared material, not long-term scheduling, and its offline behaviour is limited — it is a study tool, not a memory system.
Where it runs
A mobile app is only useful if it fits the phone you own.
- Android — Google Play, or a direct APK if the store is not available in your region
- iOS / iPadOS — the App Store, with progress synced through iCloud
- Windows 10 and 11 — a native desktop app for offline study with your synced decks
- macOS — a native app for Apple Silicon and Intel
Cross-device is the quiet feature. Review on the phone at lunch and on the laptop in the evening, and it is the same queue, not two diverging copies. The interface ships in around 28 languages, so it fits the phone’s language as well as the one you are learning.
Who this is for — and who it is not
If your real constraint is time and signal, and you want the phone to be a review device that also lets you build decks without a keyboard marathon, this is the category to look in.
If your constraint is total control over scheduling, Anki remains the honest answer, mobile quirks and all. And if you only ever review on a desktop, the mobile-first framing here matters less.
If you are weighing the wider feature set rather than just the phone experience, our full comparison is the better place to start. For paper and low-signal study, see offline and printable flashcards.
Download EnjoyCards for free and put your next commute to work.