Hello folks!

During the last weeks I've been thinking a lot about the Chinese apps on the market, prices, value for money etc., and also about the pace in which Skritter is developing.

Just to make it clear beforehand ;) I am not whining and not complaining, and I really love the Skritter app. Without it, I guess I would have never started to learn how to write hanzi, and I also think right now there is no real alternative available on the market.

But I cannot help the feeling that Skritter has stopped evolving.

The developers are not seen so much anymore on the forums; most of the feature wishes or suggestions of the users are rejected because they are “too time consuming”, ”too difficult to implement”, etc.
Instead, with the latest "improvements" in the app we have lost the time and connectivity in the upper bar, the space on the screen is (in my opinion) still not used in the best way possible, sometimes the app even freezes or the sounds stops from working, not to talk about the blue-coloured texts which appear now in some parts and visually do not belong to the app at all.

The news in the blog are limited to some - very interesting, granted - learning topics, but of which 50% is not relevant for the students (I guess mostly people do learn EITHER Jap OR Chinese, and not both).

Even the Android app, most likely *the* news in the last 12 months, comes from somebody within the community - (at least this is how I read it, sorry if I misunderstood something here).

This is my perception of Skritter right now.

On the other hand, I see the revamped Chinesepod app, the speech recording features, the new lessions they keep producing etc. etc,
and also FluentU is working hard on their iphone app (looks great, by the way).

From reading their announcements, Pleco is implementing (apparently) all wishes the users are coming up with, or at least the ones which have been asked most. One surely gets the impression and they really have a lot of things going on. Pleco is even much cheaper than Skritter, if you compare buying their one-time bundle compared to what you pay in just 1 year for Skritter. (thinking about Pleco, I still wonder why they can implement a Chinese voice recording for 34.000 characters for just 5 USD, and in Skritter, we have ended up with 3 or 4 different voices with more or less good quality, and some TTS?).
Well anyway, this is how I perceive the other apps for Chinese learning right now.

From the account status, my subscription for Skritter runs out in June this year.
With the current pricing and the best discounts, 2 years cost 180 USD or 130 €, that is still 5,50€ per month.

To be honest, I feel that after my first longer subscription, I have paid enough for the app development (as of now…). Right now it just seems that every further fee is just running into server maintenance, because at least so far I cannot see any bigger update coming up.
Maybe I am not making myself clear: I don't have the intention to discuss about "Skritter is too expensive" (we had this before in the forum), but the real question is: Will we get anything more for our money, or "is that it"?
What can we, especially those of us who just started paying when/ because the iphone app came out, what can we still expect from Skritter?
Looking forward to hearing some more opinions and see how other people feel about it.

@Zhangyanglu, great post mate and you raised some really interesting things that I had been thinking lately too.

Over the past few months, I have noticed that Skritter – even with small updates – seems to be going into support mode.

Re: your suggestions. I am a +1 for the sound recordings. I don't know why Skritter has not got sounds for all the characters. I am not a fan of TTS because it does not sound like a Chinese person (rather like a Chinese cyborg).

Also, I heard some talk about further integration with Pleco a year or so back. Is that still happening? Because if so, that would be a further app development that would be excellent!

I was wondering the same thing, until they announced that they hired another developer who has been working on the html5 version of the app.

From the newsletter, it sounds like Josh is staying on as a Skritter developer, so (pure speculation) I have a good feeling that once the HTML5 version of the app is complete, that focus will move on to adding features to the web and iOS app.

From the newsletter: "As you may have seen, George, Scott, and Nick recently launched CodeCombat, a multiplayer programming game for learning to code, and as interest in that game has exploded, they’ve been focused away from Skritter, leaving it to the trustworthy hands of Jake, Evan, Jeremy, and Josh to keep Skritter moving forward."

joeymac1981 - delays in Pleco integration are on our end; we're just incredibly busy, first with our painfully-behind-schedule 3.0 update, now with the hotly-anticipated 3.1 update (fixing pretty much all of the things people didn't like about 3.0), and as soon as that's done we have to turn right around and port most of it to Android, then turn around again and update our own flashcard system (which has not changed significantly since *2008* and badly needs an overhaul), and somewhere in there also release a bunch of new / revamped dictionaries and work around whatever Apple and Google throw at us in iOS 8 and Android 5.

Skritter is VCed so not surprising if founders move on to other ventures (as an increasing % of their time) (e.g. codecombat), and skritter will move into support mode for VCers to get their return on investment. Isn't the same happening at Chinesepod after was sold - see http://chinesepod.com/community/conversations/post/13964#

Am happy for VCs to earn their return - their money created a useful and unique product - and no competitors yet. Just hope the new team indeed keep skritter moving forward with new innovations too, if the founders step down involvement.

Pleco, I assume, wasn't started in this way, and the other notable one is anki, which is truly astonishing (online backup/syncing and all) considering is donation only funded.

We're not VC-backed, no - bootstrapped originally from my personal savings, mostly.

The problem with skritter is that it gets dull after a while...variety is the spice of life as they say

@lechuan and zhangyanglu, I'd like to toss in a bit more about myself and my plans. It's true that I'm a longtime Skritterer from the community. I started using it way back in 2008 while I was interning in Japan. I've been hooked ever since!

First and foremost I'm committed to getting the html5 project fully up and running. The first goal being getting all the features that already exist with the web and ios built into it. Which has been quite a challenge, but the team has been supporting me in terms of knowledge and API functionality as much as they can along the way.

The html5 has hopes of being much than just an Android version, especially as browsers and devices improve. It has numerous advantages over the current Flash version in terms of potential capabilities and should really put things on track for a brighter Skritter future.

Now I just need to get into gear and get this thing fully coded up to production quality. If you have some cool or must-have ideas for the html5 let me know at josh@skritter.com or drop a line on the forum topic http://www.skritter.com/forum/topic?id=618035311&comments=79.

The Skritter founders started a new venture, http://codecombat.com. That's where things are progressing at full speed now.

CodeCombat got a lot of publicity after getting "direct admission" into Y Combinator, perhaps the world's most prestigious seed investor (Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABuvRv4Vv3s). YC admission suggests that CodeCombat might reach a valuation that could put it into an entirely different category if compared to Skritter.

I'm not sure how much coding is still going into Skritter improvements (apart from the HTML5 application). Perhaps time to sell Skritter, or at least sell a majority stake? A new owner might be more willing to commit to new functionality.

Y'all are so nice and understanding. Thanks for raising the question so charitably. If you're wondering whether Skritter is still evolving, just look at Josh's work on the Skritter HTML5 GitHub: https://github.com/mcfarljw/skritter-html5/commits/master

Skritter isn't VC-funded either. We started it out of our Ohio apartment six years ago with just $55,000 in grants from our college and a local entrepreneurship to make it until profitability, years later (still in our little apartment). We ate cheaply (once we were reduced to eating Corn Flakes out of a trash can for a few days, although it's not as bad as it sounds) and took on debt to make the best character learning app we could until subscription revenues were enough to support ourselves. We did have one angel investor put in less than that, but it's pretty much a bootstrapped business like Pleco. So we're truly grateful to all the Skritterers who have supported Skritter over the years and made it possible for us to put in the 30,000 hours needed to make the app we always dreamed of.

George, Scott, and I are working on CodeCombat, and it's up to Josh, Jake, Jeremy, and Evan to keep improving Skritter. Most of the Skritter improvements are going toward the HTML5 app, since that's Josh's current bailiwick.

We could consider selling the business to an owner who wanted to develop it more aggressively, as that'd be better for Skritter users. It is unclear who would want to take it in order to improve it (as opposed to just to extract maximum value from the userbase, which would be easy but not nice) and who could also afford it. (Skritter is already too big for Mike to add to his Pleco empire.)

Good to hear that ChinesePod, FluentU, and Pleco are all exciting you and growing well. These are all great apps from great companies, and collectively are making Chinese learning awesome. One of the reasons that Skritter has never implemented any sort of dictionary-focused features is that we already love Pleco and MDBG and all the other Chinese and Japanese dictionaries which are good. There are great apps and sites and textbooks for reading, audio and video lessons, practicing conversations, and so on, and every learner should take advantage of those.

We could compete with them to make money, but not necessarily to improve Chinese and Japanese learning as a whole. We didn't want to take over; we just wanted to make the missing piece of remembering how to write all those characters. That's what Skritter is, and we feel we've accomplished that goal. That's what your $14.99/mo (or in most of your cases, $9.95/mo) go toward–not paying Skritter to add features and grow to solve problems other apps solve, but to maintain the best character learning tool, fix bugs, let us pay our server costs and the team, and bring it to new platforms. If it was worth $9.95 all those years ago, then it's still a good deal now.

@MikeLove, no problems at all mate. Like most people, I am amazed at what you have done with your Pleco app. The recent update is excellent! I love the new UI! Hopefully, you will find sometime in the future to integrate with Skritter, because if they are further integrated then it will make for an even better learning experience!

@Nick, I totally agree about not enhancing Skritter so it cannibalises Pleco and FluentU. That would just be a waste of the SKritter team's time. However, a lot of suggestions that have been put forward by the Skritter community have been unique features that could only be applied to Skritter.

For example, I think that having the 34,000 authentic sounds that Zhangyanglu suggests would be a great addition to Skritter. What it could mean is that you could test your writing based on the sound. Obviously, there would be problems with Homonyms for one character words (and even two character words), but this could be fixed by writing some code that excludes one character words, and having a hint functionality built in, so you could get prompted with a definition

I really feel that Skritter would greatly enhance my learning experience if I could have a 听写-like functionality.

Thoughts? Also, now that you have moved on, who is the main person to speak to about iOS improvements?

Thanks! :-)

P.S. like most of the people who post on this forum, I love the app. However, I just want it to be even more awesome!!

I can think of two obvious logical buyers for Skritter: the company that owns ChinesePod and the company that owns Rosetta Stone, but I'm not sure that either would benefit current Skritter users or commit to further development of Skritter. The owners of ChinesePod talked about synergy with their other property, New Concept Mandarin, at the time of the acquisition, but haven't delivered. Rosetta Stone was supposed to be cooperating with Berlitz, but I'm not sure anything came of that either. Also, Rosetta Stone is famously expensive, and I'd be afraid that they would try to make Skritter exclusive to their customers.

I want some additional stats that implement a friends feature. Just imagine your current progress graphs with your friends stats as an overlay.

@Podster: Rosetta has just recently been bought by Auralog so I figure they are busy with that integration right now.

Thanks Nick, understood - I'd seen http://www.georgesaines.com/?m=201301 post and some others and read those as meaning founders down to lowish percentage. I've no doubt a new owner would treat the skritter community worse (in terms of new features, responsiveness, openness etc.), so wouldn't want you guys to even considering selling, and if you do sell to pleco not rosetta stone!

I reread the original post, and would add I think zhangyanglu's dilemma of resubscribe or not seems a common one, and becomes more so the longer skritter is around (i.e. now is year 6, what about at year 10, 16 etc.) and have seen elsewhere of people moving to pleco or anki after active skritter subscription (either entirely or for new words) - 180$ per two years for rest of life is not very palatable, so how many subscribers take the option of not having active subscription after 2 or 4 years which means can still study words already added (using server resources etc.) but can't add words. Maybe after 2 or 4 years of paying full subscription (thus the "app price") then have cheaper ongoing costs (e.g. life/10 year subscription options) or no more cost after reach a certain $ amount (a goal, if you like, but not one big cost upfront). I don't know for sure if the increase in long-term subscriptions would outweigh loss of income from those that would pay $180 for eternity, but I'd like to think so. I certainly see a time when a non-active skritter account for old words and using pleco flashcards function for new words may be the sensible choice, which is a shame and pain. As an ios user, the app is 99% there, so don't think is really any new big features to add (although lots of little tweaks are certainly possible of course) - and html5 is for new customers, not for ios users. Skritter is great, but $900 per 10 years is worth thinking about again if are looking for life-long subscribers.

Skritter has helped me so much more than any other chinese learning tool (except for textbooks...). I will continue to pay for it because it has allowed me to reach a high level in a short amount of time.

This app is pure gold.

Thanks zhangyanglu for your awesome post as you just described my thoughts about Skritter and thank you, Nick, for your honest response about where Skritter is heading.

I think Skritter is pretty solid in what it should do, there are just a few tweaks here and there that still have to be done, but I think I will start bugging about that once the HTML5 version is done and running.

[Something like having a list of all characters you missed this day (to restudy them at once, until you get confortable with them) or auto-grade items you did wrong. (like if you forget to write a word while writing a text but the item would be due in just about 4 months)]

Maybe the perception of a slowdown in evolution suffers from "base effect." When Skritter was launched it was already a great product, but any new feature would seem a quantum leap in improvement. Now that Skritter is so feature-rich, the same new feature would seem like a very incremental improvement by comparison.

For the record, I think Skritter is great value for me personally, and will continue to subscribe.

My 2c on this is that definitely seems like evolution has slowed and that rough edges are lingering.

However worst case for me would be if Skritter tried to keep expanding into a Swiss Army knife Chinese app. Stay on target with writing...

Nightmare would be if bought by Rosetta Stone and turned into half assed attempt to integrate content, recording, dictionary etc.

Best case is to continue to be more like Pleco, which is focused on just one thing but has just killed it in executing on that niche.

I need an app that drills writing and would happily pay much more than what Skritter charges. Anki youku pleco manhua Facebook and the internet provide the rest of my Chinese stack. Best of breed.

I would just say that I think the iOS app is 99% perfect. Please don't succumb to function creep. Skritter is a writing app and as such it is marvellous - the best on the market.

To keep the current user-base happy, I would recommend all new changes should have the ability to be turned-off in the options panel, so already satisfied customers wouldn't be put off by any subsequent changes.

How could the app improve? I think:

1. More decent sound recordings of less common words. I personally can't stand the automated robot voice but I hear it nearly all the time now that I have learned some 3000+ words.

2. A real-time timer. I know, for the purposes of statistics and comparisons with other users, the skritter-time timer is essential. But sometimes a real-time timer would be more user-friendly. (If I get a phone call this disrupts my skritter-time timer, sure, but it doesn't affect the fact that I still have to go to work at a set time later!) A single touch to switch from real-time timer to skritter-time timer wouldn't be too hard to implement.

3. A history of all characters viewed that session, and the review result (available in the iOS app.) Sometimes I like to compare similar characters after study, especially if I frequently got them wrong. And sometimes I like to look at characters I've recently skrittered to show my teacher or cross-reference with other study materials.

4. The ability to turn-off example sentences.

Other than that, please don't change Skritter!

@JamesThompson adding options is against their development philosophy. If I can summarize in my own words, every option multiplies the number of configurations to test, so options should generally be avoided; instead they try to set the system up as a happy medium for the majority of their users. In some cases this means that a change annoys existing users who have gotten used to the system working a certain way, but this is an inevitable consequence of this way of doing business. I understand the desire to maintain existing functionality without changes, but this requires more developers and more testing time, which I don't think they really have; how many developers are working on Skritter right now?

James

@jww1066

Ah, I see. Well, that development philosophy certainly makes practical sense.

@ Zhangyanglu

+100500 thanks for FluentU. I was not aware about such great app, and today all day I spent on it's trial, and now i am paying subscriber.
But I will be still using skritter, and stay paying, even if no features are added anytime soon - it serves great for a purpose it's created.

I will just echo what a lot of the people have been saying....I am really happy with Skritter and don't really feel bothered if it doesn't develop a lot more. Adding some nice features can of course improve the experience by a fraction....but the main goal of the site is, namely teaching how to write Chinese/Japanese, working incredibly well.

I think the service is well worth the current cost. I use it about 10 minutes/day, which is about 5 hours a month. $2/hour to efficiently drill down on the characters I need to learn is a bargain. My impression is that my usage is on the low side, too, which means the value proposition is even stronger for many other users.

I think a more important question is at what point is Skritter, or any flashcard program, no longer the most efficient use of your time in learning new characters and/or words. I'm currently at about 2500 characters, and 5000 words (I use only Pleco for words, only Skritter for characters). Even at this point I flashcard much, much less than I used to. The trick is starting to read actual Chinese content more and more. Yes, I still find Skritter useful, but I'm guessing once I get to the 4000-5000 character range the returns will be fully diminished, especially relative to just picking up a Chinese book and enjoying it for 30 minutes (this tipping point already feels at hand, actually). At a rather leisurely 5 characters a day that's only about 3 years of Skrittering before your study time is better spent elsewhere.

I think Nick is correct in that Skritter should aim to fill a specific need in the community - learning how to write. For beginners to intermediates I think its an amazing tool to do so. For those that are more advanced, they should probably be spending more time doing actual reading and/or composition to really push the boundary of their skills.

If learning characters as come up in words, can't see getting to 5000 in 3 years as learning becomes so word heavy - soon gets to stage only need one new character for every 25 words learn, and I guess by 5000 is probably per 100 words. I understand chinese studies graduates typically end up aroudn the 2500char/hsk5 level, which is 3 or 4 years of studying (albeit often have done some classical and both simp/trad).

There is the argument that you need srs for low frequency words/characters more than high frequency as otherwise will never become active (if remembered at all). I'd love to stop srs'ing too, but I see a 10 year journey sadly. Reading is important too, but not a replacement I think.

I think the service is superb and well worth the money. (I pay $10/mon for me, and $15/mon for my son). I've been speaking Japanese for about twenty years but computers and cell phones cased my handwriting abilities to diminish. After about 18 months of Skritter, I can write all 2,136 joyo kanji by hand, and I don't plan on stopping there. Skritter is now part of my daily routine.

And, the customer support is second to none. Sorry to gush, but I am quite grateful for this service. I am glad my son can benefit from it. I would have loved to have had it when I was starting out in the mid-1990s.

ricksh - my view is that reading is the SRS replacement for the 3 sides besides writing. I mean spending at least as much time each day reading in Chinese as in your native tongue.

Actual hand writing (notes, essays, whatever) is the replacement of the writing side of flash cards. If you don't have a need to hand write daily, you don't have a need to Skritter.

My opinion is based on a belief that learning to hand write characters is of pretty low functional merit in and of itself, but is very useful as it helps reinforce characters for beginner to intermediate learners. Beyond the intermediate level someone serious about their Chinese should be spending far more time on native-targeted reading and audio-visual material, which will slowly reduce the need to SRS at all.

Tanizaki shows a good example - limited need to handwrite whatsoever for years, and relatively quick rebound once getting back into the habit of studying it. Basic maintenance probably shouldn't take much time once at an advanced level.

Again, I think the service is a great value, especially for intermediate and lower students. I don't think it should be the linchpin to a advanced student's study program.