Tinycards

» see tinycards.duolingo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Duolingo spent its first five years teaching languages and nothing else. Tinycards, released on iOS on 19 July 2016, was the first time the company pointed its machinery at something generic. A flashcard is a flashcard whether the back of it says manzana or says the atomic number of caesium, and Tinycards treated both the same way.

The format was decks broken into small units, worked through in order or in whatever order you felt like. The spaced-repetition scheduling was the same family of logic that ran the main app, so cards you kept getting wrong came back sooner. Decks that Duolingo built themselves arrived with the house illustrations, the flat pastel drawings of apples and owls that were already the company's visual signature, and language decks played native-speaker audio. You could hide a card you already knew. That was close to the full feature list, and the thinness was the point.

The part that grew was the part Duolingo did not make. Users built their own decks and published them, and by the time the Android version shipped on 30 August 2017 there were over 200,000 of them. A web version had arrived earlier the same year, so a deck made on a phone was reviewable on a laptop. The catalogue covered the obvious study subjects and then kept going well past them, into world flags and anatomy and the full Pokedex, which is what happens whenever you give people a publishing tool and no editorial policy.

~ the record ~

~ the small team problem ~

Thirteen months is a long gap between an iOS release and an Android one, especially for a company whose users skew toward the places where Android is the default phone. Duolingo said so directly when the Android build finally landed. A spokesperson told TechCrunch that the team was relatively small, that the overall focus was on Duolingo itself, and, with an honesty you do not often get in a launch quote, that great Android developers were pretty hard to find.

Duolingo arrived in Turkey the way it arrived everywhere, which is to say on the phones of people who were not otherwise studying anything. Tinycards did not travel with it. I knew the owl and I did not know the flashcards, and given the thirteen months it took to reach the phones most people here were holding, that was more or less the designed outcome.

~ the day it died ~

Duolingo ended support on 1 September 2020 and the reasoning was the same reasoning as the Android delay, now with the conclusion attached. The people on Tinycards were needed on Duolingo. The apps came out of the stores and the service stopped answering, which left anybody who had been publishing a deck a week for four years looking for somewhere else to put the next one.

tinycards.duolingo.com still resolves in 2026. It answers with a redirect to duolingo.com, which is the tidiest form of this particular death: not a farewell page, just a subdomain quietly folded back into its parent. Third-party flashcard tools published migration pages for the refugees, which was more of an exit ramp than the publisher provided.

~ what got buried with it ~

The 200,000 decks were the asset, and they were made by people who were not paid for them. Some of those decks represented serious work, a semester of medical terminology or a full verb table, built by one student and used by thousands. None of it was portable into the main Duolingo app, because the main Duolingo app had no concept of a user-authored anything.

In November 2025, Duolingo added a flashcards exercise to its lessons. It arrived five years after Tinycards was switched off, inside the product that had absorbed the staff. You cannot build a deck in it from your own vocabulary, and you cannot control how the cards come back. Duolingo decides what goes on the card.

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