[Android] Smouldering Durtles (v1.2.8) - native app with offline lessons and reviews, plus themes and script-like features!

WaniKani API And Third-Party Apps
684

First off - recent returnee here. I went through a brief period of shock upon realizing Flaming Durtles died, then found Smouldering and thanked all heavens! Thank you so much!

2 minor questions I couldn’t solve yet:

  1. Can I modify either the position of the status upgrade notifications or the length of it showing when a kanji levels up? I’m still at the part of the program where I can breeze through many kanji and I have to wait for the status upgrade notification to disappear before doing the next one. I do like having some sort of visual feedback on it, though.
  2. Can I somehow set it to still review burned items (should I ever make it that far)?

Thanks so much for any advice and keeping this alive, it’s an absolutely invaluable tool and makes my life so much better!

685

Welcome back! :waving_hand:

  1. I don’t think the size of the toast can be adjusted. Maybe by increasing the font size of the main text (the item being quizzed), it can be made big enough to avoid being covered by the toast. Though in my experience, tweaking the font sizes can break the UI. (Esthetically, not to the point of being unusable.)
  2. I think this is a no, too. You can use self study, and only select burned items, but that won’t keep track of the progress. You might find some ideas in this thread.
686

I’m encountering an issue where the app crashed/freezes if I try to play an audio file that isn’t downloaded yet. Is there a way to fix this (other than downloading the audio file) or is the nothing I can do on the user end? I’m on a S22+. I thought that of I tried to play an unavailable audio file or would just not play the file and not freeze.

687

where is the audio downloaded files located i tried looking in data/com.smouldering_durtles.wk/files/

688

Hello,
Could you implement a listening mode similar to the script I made ? [Userscript] WaniKani 'Listening Mode'. Thank you !

689

Thank you so much for this, it definitely was useful! I was having the same problem and feared WaniKani was down for whatever reason.

Doing the same steps fixed it for me too!

P.S: Thank you so much for the app, Joeni! <3 It’s great and allows me to keep studying in my Android. Loved that “the fire hasn’t burnt out” and the naming homage!

P.P.S.: Solution still works in Feb. 2026, in case anyone else needs it!

690

How are you planning to deal with this google issue? Since it’s a problem that affects all apps, l thought about making a post in a general forum, but to be honest, your app is what I’m worried about the most at this moment, so I’ll just start asking here.

Plus some more information here

691

I haven’t used anything stock Android in almost a decade. So this won’t change anything for me - but I’m not the application developer. At this point I mainline an iphone and two ipads, and keep an old LineageOS phone around for this app and nothing else.

Deleted the diatribe but suffice to say Google drove me out with their antagonistic behavior back in about 2016 or 2017 and going back to Apple was not a decision I was super happy to make. But this is a great example of why.

692

I’m ashamed to say this is the first I’m hearing about this.
(I’ve actually always been an iOS/macOS person and SD is the only engagement I have in the Android space, so I’m not great at keeping up with news)

Google’s moral/ethical stance aside, I don’t believe this change will cause any issues for the app going forward. It’s registered against my already paid-up and fully verified developer account, so will remain available on the store.

As an open source application, the unsigned development builds will remain on Github and as well as this the app is available on the F-Droid repository as well.

An aside on walled-garden platforms..

As an aforementioned user of the Apple ecosystem, where this walled-garden approach has been the standard for nearly as long as app stores have been a thing - I understand the backlash to Google’s decision, but I also understand why that’s the direction of their travel.

It’s annoying for anyone who wants to just make and share stuff, or who doesn’t want to link their personal information to their apps, but from a cost perspective $25 for a perpetual right to publish is pretty reasonable (Apple charge $99/year) and from a security and governance perspective (I work as a senior dev in the education sector, so am very used to everything being by the book) identity based accountability for what you produce isn’t the worst thing in the world.

This is probably a controversial view in some development spaces, but I feel like with the rise of apps that turn out to be using your phones processor to mine crypto, or that can be used to create inappropriate AI images of real people, or that spread misinformation, etc., being able to have that verification of developer identity isn’t the worst thing in the world.

SD operates in the open-source space, where anybody who cares to can check the code for anything nefarious, but that’s not the case for all Android apps in the wild.

693

Is it possible to make the app compatible with microG? My device doesn’t have google play services and runs microG instead, but the app immediately closes saying that google play services are required.

694

How are you installing it? I don’t have Google Play Services on Lineage OS and it runs fine for me. I installed the one from the Git repo.

695

I got it off the Aurora Store.

696

Might try to F-Droid apk file. You shouldn’t need play services at all for this and I don’t know why it should be asking for those as far as I’m aware. Perhaps it’s some kind of Aurora check before run. I don’t know anything about Aurora itself but my LineageOS works great with no attempt on my part to provide play services at all. and if something required it I’d stop using it.

Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, anyone who knows better.

697

Hm. I guess the google play store version has a google play services requirement. The F-Droid version works just fine.

698

That sounds pretty sinister on the part of the play store. But I’m glad the f-droid one works for you.

699

The problem is this extends beyond Google and Apple app-stores where they may do whatever verification they want (which they don’t seeing absurd ammount of scam apps that goes through their “reviews”: https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2025/09/224-malicious-apps-removed-from-the-google-play-store-after-ad-fraud-campaign-discovered).

This is just a control power grab of the wider ecosystem, nothing else. And just because Apple is leading with terrible practices doesn’t mean they are right or correct :slight_smile: In the end this is MY DEVICE and I should be able to do with it whatever I please without some BigTech overloards having controll over the process (especially considering they are from a place getting more and more hostile towards the rest of the world, including supposed “allies” =,=)

700

More importantly to this thread, are you having any issues with this particular app or is this just going to be a political thread now that I should unsubscribe from?

701

Known issue with ‘Ribcage’ Radical

I’ve had a number of emails regarding a missing radical and taking a look at it, I can see that this is being provided as an image, rather than the expected text character, causing the app to fail to display it.

I’ve put a ticket in with Tofugu to ask why this might be :slight_smile:

For the time being, I suggest this new mnemonic device:

“The ribcage is inside your chest and supports you, but you can’t see it”

702

Radicals aren’t meant to be written by themselves and are quite subjective, which means they might not have a unicode representation and can’t be written as a letter. So we got to use images for that.

Thankfully wanikani’s api provide these. You can find them in the “Radical Attributes” section on the api doc.

However Smouldering durtles doesn’t use this endpoint and instead has some hardcoded version of this in Subject#getTitleImageId(). So we could add a resource there to support the ribcage radical, or in a more scalable way retrieve them from the backend instead.

Here’s and Android resource that should work for the ribcage radical:

<!-- Horizontal line -->
<path
    android:pathData="M35,482.15 L966,482.15"
    android:strokeColor="?attr/colorOnBackground"
    android:strokeWidth="68"
    android:strokeLineCap="square"
    android:strokeMiterLimit="2"
    android:fillColor="@android:color/transparent" />

<!-- Vertical line (top half only) -->
<path
    android:pathData="M496.28,36 L496.28,479.15"
    android:strokeColor="?attr/colorOnBackground"
    android:strokeWidth="68"
    android:strokeLineCap="square"
    android:strokeMiterLimit="2"
    android:fillColor="@android:color/transparent" />

<!-- Upper horizontal line 1 -->
<path
    android:pathData="M77.96,149 L921.96,149"
    android:strokeColor="?attr/colorOnBackground"
    android:strokeWidth="68"
    android:strokeLineCap="square"
    android:strokeMiterLimit="2"
    android:fillColor="@android:color/transparent" />

<!-- Upper horizontal line 2 -->
<path
    android:pathData="M140.89,299.96 L857.78,299.96"
    android:strokeColor="?attr/colorOnBackground"
    android:strokeWidth="68"
    android:strokeLineCap="square"
    android:strokeMiterLimit="2"
    android:fillColor="@android:color/transparent" />
703

When I did the lesson and the reviews for rib cage, it showed up fine. But now I took a look at it on the search page, plus opened its info page, and it’s really invisible. I wonder if it would be OK again for the next review, but that’s four days ahead.

The other weird thing is, there are other image-only radicals which are totally fine. For example the Lion.