Hello there!
I have been using the third party WaniKani app for Android called ‘Flaming Durtles’ for quite some time, and up until recently I have experienced no serious qualms that slow down my learning experience.
Since about maybe a month ago (Last update?) my app no longer automatically toggles between Japanese and English for the readings and meanings… It is stuck perpetually in English no matter how much I toggle the ‘Keyboard Input Settings’ and follow the advice listed. My Android version is 11. I don’t know what’s happened but I wasn’t having this problem before and didn’t touch the settings at all when I started having this problem.
Yep, it did break a while ago. Unfortunately I’m pretty sure it’s unmaintained now. With those settings you’ve got it still semi-works for me though - for the first reading question I have to manually switch to the kana keyboard, but after that it’ll autoswitch (I use Gboard)
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Thank you, I use Gboard as well, but it is a pain to manually switch between the English and Japanese as well… Haven’t managed to get it to autoswitch again. I hope this gets resolved in the near future.
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The last update was in April of 2022, so it’s probably not necessarily the apps fault. Not sure if the developer is still active
The app is open source if somebody wants to have a look: GitHub - ejplugge/com.the_tinkering.wk
If I’m not mistaken that’s the code that broke somehow: com.the_tinkering.wk/ViewProxy.java at 524bb4cf24397d6578f64e52ee6fdf49edf67338 · ejplugge/com.the_tinkering.wk · GitHub
Unfortunately I’m not an Android dev (nor a java dev) so I didn’t go beyond this. I think the first step would be to look at the docs for this setImeHintLocales API, see if something changed.
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Also not an Android dev, so don’t really have any idea. Only thing which I came up with after a really quick look is that maybe it’s missing the InputMethodManager.restartInput(View) function call so that the “hint” is applied immediately? Hopefully someone who actually knows Android dev might take a look at some point 
Yeah there’s got to be some app devs lurking these forums, right? STEM people are the biggest weebs.
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This may or may not help, but my Gboard setup in preferences is below (note, I have Portuguese and Ukrainian keyboards active as well) followed by an example use.
For Flaming Durtles I prefer GODAN for kana entry. The first time I get kana entry after the app gets reloaded (which means not necessarily every session, but the first session after it gets moved out of memory or manually swiped away from the app overview), I will have to switch to GODAN for Japanese input. After that, it auto-switches between QWERTY (which happens to be swipable for either English or Portuguese in my case, but that shouldn’t matter) and GODAN.
(Oops—I thought I had a highlight in the lower-left [fourth] screenshot on the
key, but I must have forgotten. Holding that down is how I got the “Change keyboard” button for 夫 in the next screen.)
One reason I like GODAN for this is that it never autocompletes to a kanji (you have to select from the ribbon every time), so you can just hit the green ✓ button twice to check a reading.
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Just one thing I’d point out—the official WaniKani web app doesn’t do this either—and the docs say this is intentional.
The WaniKani Knowledgebase says that it prefers to simulate a Japanese IME itself with the English keyboard over a real IME (presumably mainly so it doesn’t auto-complete kanji which could ruin the entry or at least give you a hint, but perhaps there are other reasons as well).
And on an iPad Pro with a hardware keyboard, if you do inadvertently have your IME active for entry and forget to swap it to English before typing anything in a Meaning request, you can mess up entry so badly you have to close the tab and start over. (At least, this was true for the pre-Monday old UI. I haven’t had it happen in error this week, so I’m not sure if this issue still presents.)
So if they enabled that behavior, you’d be forced to use your IME or switch back to English for every reading. In the current behavior, at least you can select once per session rather than having to swap every single time you go from Reading to Meaning or vice-versa.
Just to follow-up: I think this issue has been addressed in the March 2023 update of the web app. I haven’t seen the issue—which manifested as kana entry only generating all-caps Latin letters which never get converted into kana, with the only fix being closing the tab and opening a new one—since the update.
Sorry, totally off-topic for this community topic, but I did want to close the loop…