Team AnkiHub Updates - April 2026
April is here! And so are a lot of things we’ve been building toward – a new research update, upcoming Anki installer overhaul, improved Smart Search, brand new decks released and in the works, new features, and a lovely team member we want you to meet!
From smarter studying tools in Anki, to new features rolling out at AnkiHub, this month has been jam packed with exciting community news. Here’s everything dropping - and some sneak peaks at what’s coming next!
Anki Antics - Research and Roadmap
Research Check In: Last month we announced an exciting new research project - see here: Formalizing Memory Models. Since then, the research team has published another blog post to introduce how they will be evaluating prospective memory models:
They’ve also made progress in preparing to train models on very large spaced repetition datasets. Stay tuned for initial results in the coming weeks!
Anki Installer Overhaul: We’ve heard you loud and clear, the installer experience for Anki wasn’t great, so the team has been hard at work improving it for all of you. This will be shipped in the next Anki version release 
Waiting on the next Anki version release to ship.
Performance & Bug Fixes: Several quality-of-life issues were resolved this month: MacOS config dialog no longer deadlocks Anki.
What’s been cooking at AnkiHub
Better Search and Study Experience
This month we’ve continued to roll out more improvements to SmartSearch that will help users find the right notes faster.
- Search is getting smarter.
- If you’ve ever uploaded a lecture that was filled with images and didn’t get the smart search results you were expecting, this fixes it. The team switched to a better document-reading technology (Mistral OCR) that does a much better job parsing PDFs — especially ones with images or scanned pages. This means Smart Search will return more accurate, relevant results. This is nearly live.
- Big performance fixes.
- A handful of frustrating bugs got squashed: the Mac app no longer freezes when opening the config dialog, images no longer overflow on the suggestions page, and large sync operations that used to take 20–30 seconds are now fast.
For Deck Maintainers
Improvements to the tools maintainers rely on every day.
- Bulk-accepted suggestions disappear from the queue instantly. After accepting a batch, they now move to a “Processing” state immediately and clear out without a refresh - which means, no more 10–30 second (or longer) delays!
- Open suggestions shown by default. The review page now filters to open/pending suggestions by default, fixing a bug introduced with the author sidebar that caused closed suggestions to appear and clutter the queue.
- “Show per page” control added to Author and Related Notes sidebars. The dropdown now appears in the Author and Related Notes panels, matching the main suggestion list. Especially useful for high-volume contributors with hundreds of pending suggestions.
- Suggestion type filtering in Author sidebar. A Change Notes / New Notes / Delete Notes tab navigation now lets maintainers filter by type in the sidebar, matching what’s already available on the main suggestions page.
New Features Still in the Oven:
Account Deletion: Users will soon be able to delete their own accounts. This feature will be implemented soon!
Membership Settings Clarity: The membership settings page is being redesigned to accurately reflect all plan types, directly addressing a top source of user confusion and support tickets sent to our CS team.
Deck Updates:
New Project: AnKing BLS / ACLS Deck – Shipped!
Fully released! With 2,000 subscribers to the deck already! This deck is based on the 2025 AHA guidelines and is meant to be a high-yield, practical review resource for healthcare providers, students, nurses, paramedics, and any other interested learners.
Check out the full announcement here: Introducing the AnKing BLS / ACLS Deck! 🚨
New Project: ABIM Deck – In the works!
Hey Internal Med Residents – this one’s for you! With over 33k active IM residents in the US alone, Mujeeb Mohammed, one of our talented step deck illustrators and maintainers, saw an opportunity to help your learning journey with a high-quality, structured Anki Deck comparable to the AnKing Step Deck.
This project is led by @mujeeb as lead deck maintainer, as well as Abdulla Jastaniah and Ahmed Khudair, with full support from the rest of the maintainer team . The ABIM deck is now formally scoped and on it’s way to creation!
Current status: Phase 1 (Planning)
- Planned Structure:
- Primary sources: UWorld, MKSAP,Board Basics, AMBOSS
- Style, the same you know and love: High-yield, cloze-based (consistent with Step Deck)
- QID tagging system being finalized
- Illustrations planned to match Step Deck quality
We will continue to update you further as we get closer to release!
Share Your Experience
We’re collecting stories from students and learners about their journey with Anki and AnkiHub. We want to know what’s working, what’s changed in how you study, and where you’ve seen the Anki Ecosystem make a real difference.
If Anki has been a meaningful part of your learning experience, we’d love to hear about it. We’re inviting a handful of community members for short, casual 20–30 minute conversations to better understand how people are actually using these tools.
No prep needed — just your honest experience.
Meet the Team
Data Engineering & DevOps - Meet MK Barton!
MK Barton works behind the scenes to make AnkiHub faster, more reliable, and ready to scale. Based in Chicago with his husband and two dogs, he spends his free time cooking, making music, and learning card magic.
MK joined AnkiHub over a year ago, growing from part-time into a full-time data engineering and DevOps role. You can think of him as the infrastructure architect. He keeps data flowing, systems running, and the dev team unblocked. Currently, he’s leading a major infrastructure migration giving the team greater control over performance, scaling, and deployments. The reliability improvements you’ve noticed? MK’s behind them.
Before AnkiHub, he spent five years at Healthvana building data systems for HIV and STI clinics - bringing this deep healthcare data experience with him to Team Anki. He describes himself simply as a “digital pipe fitter”: making sure data gets from where it’s created to where it’s needed, so AnkiHub keeps getting better for students like you!
One last note…
We’re launching something new! Each month we’ll pose a question to the AnkiHub community in these updates – and then in the following month’s post, we’ll share how the team answered!
First up: If your study style were a movie genre, what would it be?
Be sure to reply below! 
Chat soon, Katie & the AnkiHub team 
Bug Fixes
- Protected Field Media No Longer Downloaded — Media attached to fields a user has protected (e.g. Sketchy images after a user deletes and protects them) will no longer be downloaded during sync. This prevents unnecessary disk usage for users who customize their card layouts.
- Intercom Chat Now Works When Cookies Are Declined — Users who declined the cookie consent banner were unintentionally cut off from Intercom support chat. This has been fixed — Intercom now loads for all logged-in users regardless of cookie preferences.
- Subscription Endpoint N+1 Query Fixed — The /api/decks/subscriptions/ endpoint was making 1 + 5N database queries (one per deck subscription). This is now reduced to 3 queries total, regardless of how many subscriptions a user has — improving response time for heavy users.
Useful Links
AnkiHub Ambassador Application Form
Our wonderful support team continues efforts to help ensure all of you can get set up and studying without unnecessary friction.
If you need any help with getting set up with Anki or AnkiHub, feel free to reach out on the community forum and we’ll help you ASAP!
Get support from our team https://community.ankihub.net or email us at support@ankihub.net
