WaniKani Mobile - [End of Support]

[s84606]

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This app is not maintained by me any more. Please consider switching to WaniKani for Android
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Hi all, here is an app that tailors WaniKani to Android devices. Most features come from suggestions of this community, so I believe it's useful for many of you who want to use WaniKani using their mobile phone or tablet.

This software is Open Source, and hosted by GitHub:
        https://github.com/WaniKani/Android-Notification

Download links: 
- https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.wanikani.androidnotifier
- https://www.dropbox.com/s/lgrqgjtytiltatc/WaniKaniMobile-1.15.6-.apk

Features:
- Notify when new reviews (and optionally lessons) become available. A threshold may be set, and can be made persistent.
- SRS distribution plots, showing how the number of items at each level changes day by day
- Japanese font used when reviewing can be customized, and does not require rooting the device
- Reviews timeline
- Joyo, JLPT progress, and SRS by level
- Dashboard showing level progression and study queue
- Item browser: all items, filtering by level, by SRS, by critical items, by recent unlock, available date, search dialog
- Integrated reviews and lessons, with integrated IME
- Integrated with @ruipgpinheiro's WaniKani Override script, WaniKani KunOn and Mistake Delay
- Integrated @Seiji's WaniKani improve script
- Integrated @Alucardeck's WaniKani Review Order script and WaniKani Lesson Order script
- Integrated @jeshuamorrissey's external definition frame placer and Part-Of-Speech script
- Charts to show learning progress
- Optionally keep screen awake during lessons and reviews
- Optimized for small size screens, but also alternative layout for large screens. If you own a tablet (or even if you don't) make sure to try also 鰐蟹Droid (/t/鰐蟹Droid-WaniKani-for-Android/2312/1) and choose the one you like best!

Release notes for v. 1.15.5:

- Fix for l52+ levels (no radicals, nanori support)
- Font scale
- Disable suggestions
- Option to move vocab first in a batch of lesson
- Fixed few device-specific bugs

Notes:
If the device supports Japanese Locale, the app can show Japanese fonts while reviewing (check the corresponding menu item). If for some reason it does not work, or you want to use a different font, check also:
- If you own a 4.1+ device, you can try @Ascend's application.
- Otherwise, here is a link that describes how to set them manually (big thanks to @scrent for sharing it)
The item browser always shows Japanese Kanji if the font file is on the device (which is not always true).

Screenshots:

[Doublevil]

Oh I wrote the same thing with the exact same name last month, but I never released it because it’s basically an ugly white screen with your name and review count written in tiny characters at the top-left of the screen, that schedules an alarm and a notification for the date of your next reviews every time you launch it…

Do you plan on adding features to, say, match the iOS app?

[RoxyGet]

Woot! Thanks for making this. I have an Android phone and this is going to be super useful for me.

[s84606]

Well, I can’t say my app is much different than yours then :) 
I’ve not seen the IOS app (I don’t have an IPhone), so I don’t have a clear idea of how it could be evolved.
I’d like, for instance, to gather stats and plot them, just to show how the progress is going.
This however depends a lot on how much spare time I’ll manage to find (not much, I’m afraid).

[Doublevil]

The iPhone app (only seen screenshots, I am a proud iPhone non-owner), asides from having a nice look, has a “review” button that takes you to a page inside the app with an integrated browser, allowing you to do your reviews without having to launch a browser.
At least, that’s what I understood.

Other ideas could be, well, to just use everything the API can offer. List all the kanji you know, display the “recently unlocked” list and all. But that’s definitely not a priority.

Stats are a great idea too, but I’m not sure how you can do that with the API…?

[kidchameleon]

Thank you for including us non-iPhone users.  I use Firefox and Android and it feels a little offputting to see the lack of support.

[s84606]

Thank you for your kind feedback. 
@Doublevil, I’ll have a look to the screenshots… regarding the “review button”, I think it is a good idea. Currently the browser is opened by tapping on the notification icon, however providing a way to do that also from the app would be nice. I do that by invoking the default browser, which, on small screens, is quite clumsy, but I don’t think there is a better way to do that. Or is it?
Regarding the stats, my idea was to gather daily samples and save them locally: I think the required storage would be negligible.
Another possible feature is to register the app as a regular vocabulary, so e.g. you could read an ebook and look up a word… I don’t know if it’s feasable, nor if it would really be helpful (WaniKani is not exactly an online vocabulary).

[Doublevil]

s84606 said... Thank you for your kind feedback. 
@Doublevil, I'll have a look to the screenshots.. regarding the "review button", I think it is a good idea. Currently the browser is opened by tapping on the notification icon, however providing a way to do that also from the app would be nice. I do that by invoking the default browser, which, on small screens, is quite clumsy, but I don't think there is a better way to do that. Or is it?
Regarding the stats, my idea was to gather daily samples and save them locally: I think the required storage would be negligible.
Another possible feature is to register the app as a regular vocabulary, so e.g. you could read an ebook and look up a word.. I don't know if it's feasable, nor if it would really be helpful (WaniKani is not exactly an online vocabulary).

Yeah, calling the default browser is probably the better thing to do. I think you could use an embedded browser control, but that would be a waste of time for a negligible user comfort gain.
For the stats, why not, it would be a nice addition indeed.
And for your last idea, I believe you mean "dictionary"? Listing the kanji you unlocked with a search field would kinda provide this feature without much programming effort.

[fairnobody]

is it possible to get this on the amazon appstore? i use a Kindle

[s84606]

Hi, some updates on this topic:
- Today I’ve released a new version of this app on Google Play. There’s still a lot of work to do, but at least it looks a little bit nicer than the first version.  Unfortunately I had to change the application key/class, so if you have downloaded the very first version (i.e. on Google Play the only option is “Install”, not “Update”)  you’ll have to uninstall the old version before upgrading. Sorry. I promise it’ll never happen again
- Viet has kindly created a new repository for this project at WaniKani,  so the code now lives here: https://github.com/WaniKani/Android-Notification
@fairnobody, in principle I have no problem distributing also on Amazon, however I’m not familiar with it: I’ll check ASAP.

[desocietas]

I just DLed the new version, and I like the new look!

Just a heads up about the API key: I’m not sure if it’s my phone’s browser or what, but the API key has the last 3 characters cut off.  So when I copy and paste into your app, it says I’ve done it wrong.  Thankfully, I had my computer up at the same time and checked the API key against the desktop browser and saw which characters were left off.

This is probably more of an issue for the WK folks to look at in regard to the mobile site, but I just wanted to give you a headsup in case people complained that it didn’t work even after copying and pasting their API key in.

[s84606]

Thank you for your feedback!
I can’t find a way to make the setup less painful, but I guess that giving some hint on what’s wrong with the API key would be sensible (and cheap).
In the next release, I’ll put something like “Your key is 3 chars too short” in the error msg, so people would know what to look for…

[desocietas]

I saw that you added the browser link for when reviews are ready - works great for me! Thanks - I’m enjoying the app and will update my Google Play review.

[desocietas]

Sorry for the double-post…

I have some lessons waiting for me and notice that the notifier doesn’t show the number of lessons or offer a link to go work on them.

I saw that the Chrome WK Notifier also doesn’t have an indicator that there are lessons waiting to be looked at, but it does list the number of lessons, at least.  I don’t know anything about Android apps, so I’m not sure why the number of lessons don’t show up on your app.

Thanks!

[s84606]

Hi, do you mean that they do not appear in the GUI or there is no notification icon?
The first case is simpler: the GUI is automatically refreshed only once in 15 minutes. It’s long timeout, but when I chose the timers I tried to minimize the network traffic and battery consumption.  I think that in the next release I will lower it to 5 minutes…
The second case is a little bit more complex, and may be a bug: the notification icon may be slow to disappear automatically, but should always appear in time. I can think of only one possible case where it may not appear in time, and this is when the last notification is deleted by pusing the “delete” button on the top bar rather than tapping on the “You have xxx reviews pending” message. 

Thanks! 

[Ankotaro]

Oh hey, this is much nicer than the test app I slapped together last month.   I ran into a problem with my intended version and just kinda stopped… >.<

My app was supposed have a “home” tab that basically had the same functionality and rough look as your app, and another tab that showed unlocked items by level and/or item type.  Might I suggest adding something similar to the latter and giving the user the ability to change the refresh frequency? 

[anana3322]

Just downloaded it. It looks great. Thank you!

[s84606]

Hi, thanks for the suggestions! Making the refresh timer configurable should be pretty easy, and I’ll add this feature in the next release.
I’ll add also an “unlocked items” tab, as you suggest. Probably not in the next release, because I’ve started working on an feature that allows to perform the reviews through an integrated browser (don’t know how long it will take, also because I can test it only when I have not-so-precious items in my study queue :)

[desocietas]

s84606 said... Hi, do you mean that they do not appear in the GUI or there is no notification icon?
The first case is simpler: the GUI is automatically refreshed only once in 15 minutes. It's long timeout, but when I chose the timers I tried to minimize the network traffic and battery consumption.  I think that in the next release I will lower it to 5 minutes...
The second case is a little bit more complex, and may be a bug: the notification icon may be slow to disappear automatically, but should always appear in time. I can think of only one possible case where it may not appear in time, and this is when the last notification is deleted by pusing the "delete" button on the top bar rather than tapping on the "You have xxx reviews pending" message. 

Thanks! 

Cool, I have some lessons queued up for me right now, so I'll wait maybe half an hour and see if a notification or anything shows up to indicate that they're waiting for me.  I'll let you know! 

UPDATE: Yup, it's been about two hours later, and it does say I have some reviews queued up, but the number of lessons has not changed from zero (my dashboard says I have 28 lessons and two reviews waiting).

UPDATE #2: I just updated to your next version (sorry I didn't do that earlier!), and saw that the lessons line was removed so it's not an issue anymore, really :)  Not unless you want the app to notify users of lessons, but I don't think it's as important as the reviews in terms of notifications.

[s84606]

Uhh… only now I notice that  I totally misread your posts …
I thought you spoke about reviews, not lessons (and you wrote lessons, so I have no excuses
Currently the app does not notify about pending lessons. I decided against this basically for two reasons:

• When promoted to the next level, WK unlocks a lot of new lessons. At higher levels, when items become quite complicated, people may decide not to unlock all of them at once, so having lessons in the queue should be quite normal;
• Lessons become available only after a review cycle, so I got used to check for them after completing each of them. 

Next week I will probably release another version, which allows to review the items directly inside the app. This way it should be easier to see if there are lessons in the study queue because at the end of the sessions you’ll be brought back to the initial page of the app. 
However notifying also when lessons become available should be quite easy. If you think it is an useful enhancement, I will gladly add an option for that too.