Anki
Anki is a spaced-repetition flashcard app for macOS that helps students and lifelong learners review material efficiently over time.
What is Anki?
Anki is a desktop education app for creating and studying digital flashcards with spaced repetition. It helps students, language learners, and professionals remember facts, vocabulary, formulas, and other material by scheduling reviews around what is harder or easier for them to recall. On macOS, users can build their own decks, study shared decks, add images, audio, and video to cards, and sync their collection across devices through AnkiWeb. The desktop app also supports large collections and add-ons, which makes it useful for both simple study routines and more customized learning workflows. Ankitects Pty Ltd publishes the desktop app and the official Anki ecosystem spans computer, web, and mobile use.
Key features
- Create your own flashcard decks for subjects, languages, and exam prep.
- Review cards with spaced repetition so difficult material appears more often.
- Import shared decks to start studying without building everything from scratch.
- Add images, audio, video, and scientific markup to flashcards.
- Sync your cards and progress across devices with AnkiWeb.
- Customize card layouts, review timing, and study behavior.
- Extend the desktop app with add-ons for specialized workflows.
Review app leftovers with diCleaner
Inspect caches, support files, containers, and login items before cleaning.
Safety overview
Status: Safe
Anki is a well-known study application, and storing study data locally plus syncing through AnkiWeb is consistent with its purpose. The main privacy consideration is the content of your decks: personal notes, class material, or other sensitive study content may be included in cards you sync or share. Keep the app updated, install add-ons carefully, and review deck-sharing choices before uploading private material.
Recommendation: Keep Anki if you use flashcards for study or exam preparation, because removing it also removes convenient access to your local decks and add-on workflow. If you no longer use it, you can uninstall the app after exporting or syncing anything you want to keep.
Common paths
/Applications/Anki.app
Cache paths
~/Library/Caches/net.ankiweb.dtop
Support paths
~/Library/Application Support/Anki2
Preference paths
~/Library/Preferences/net.ankiweb.dtop.plist
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