[App Feedback] It is not possible to download the courses in free version

Community-Created Courses Learning Central
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10

After trying out the courses you want, couldn’t you just sign up for a month and then cancel. During that month download whatever you want. All for $9 or am I missing something?

(Actually, I thought there was a trial version of Pro, but I can’t find it … so I assume that they have stopped offering it. All they seem to have now - is you can contact them for a refund - which is a bit of a pain)

One problem is that you might not get course updates after cancelling. But it might be worth a test to see if that works or not.

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Hi again
I don’t know how the beginning day can be found by in my profile you can see my first “MEM” was created 3 month ago!
I think I am using Memrise since about 5 month ago.

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In some country like Iran, people can not buy or pay for anything in Google store or any foreign company.

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Is there any of Memrise official people here to answer to our problem?
I send an email about this problem but no one has answer me yet! :angry:

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Don’t know how to get a response from Memrise. You could try mentioning them by @ then their username. I think the Memrise staff have little shields by their name. [Edit: lien is the name of the staff member I quoted in my first comment above]

A user in another conversation provided a link to download older versions of Memrise.

Sorry, but I am not an Android user so can’t explain if you need to jailbreak or anything. It may just be another store. Certainly the About Us page makes it sound like only a simple download is required. It will probably lose any courses you currently have downloaded though. I have no idea, but I thought it might be worth you looking at.

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Apart of that loosing availability of updates (this is agruable because we don’t know what happens when Pro period expires), another complaint here was that a teacher cannot afford buying a new course for the whole class she leads, as now every single device needs to be connected to get updates. Also, pupils obviously must have access to the course when away from school.
I think it’s @pdao 's post.

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I mentioned lien as she is staff - I don’t think pdao is.

The OP wanted a response from staff.

I have left it to the OP to do the mention, as I don’t want to get in the way.

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I am @pdao, and I can equivocally state that I am just a user of this product, not a Memrise staff member. @Lien is the one you probably want to address your concerns to.

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I’m downloading some versions, and they don’t display Japanese characters… Which is ironic since one of them displayed Japan’s flag when I started it up. It’s like they don’t include unicode (now I’m a bit afraid since I want to learn Greek soon). I’ll keep downloading different versions until I find one that works, or search another website that provides a stable version.

I wanted delete my account because I haven’t used it for many months, so I wanted a fresh start. Didn’t expect Memrise would change its policy like this.[quote=“jimnicholson, post:15, topic:1626”]
Sorry, but I am not an Android user so can’t explain if you need to jailbreak or anything. It may just be another store. Certainly the About Us page makes it sound like only a simple download is required. It will probably lose any courses you currently have downloaded though. I have no idea, but I thought it might be worth you looking at.
[/quote]

Yes, it’s almost that simple when installing Android apps that aren’t from Play Store. Surely the OS will prevent you installing them if you haven’t enabled installing “Unknown sources”, which is located on Security from Settings (possibly its location varies depending on the Android version, but I don’t think so).

And I’m sure that it will delete all your data if you uninstall the app, which has to be done if you’re gonig to install an older version. At least my phone didn’t allow me installing an older version until I uninstalled the one I downloaded from Play Store.

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Hi Lien,

I could definitely use the offline mode before, so should I still be able to use it then?
Because I cannot download anything right now, which is quite a shame.

Kind regards,
Bob

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Hi @lien
Thank you for your kind helping
I use memrise before that day. But I have updated my app. Anyway I had some issue with my streak and after Memrise helped me and they offer to log out. during logging out process, “downloaded course” being removed. When I tried to download them again I found out it has became a Pro feature. In my opinion it is not fair, and in business approach it is a wrong turn because you are going to loose your competitive advantage. It 's like that you take back some things from your user which they enjoyed. generally make any limitation affect on customer or users adversely. You can see many company for example Apple, that reduce the number of limitation to get customer satisfaction.
oh, it is became a long story.
apologize because my English is not good.
I will be grateful if you transmit these to managers.

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This is a real blow for teachers, my pupils download the courses so they can use offline whilst on the bus, at lunchtime etc. Very disappointed. None of my school pupils are going to want to pay for this.

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lol its my dream to download offlice course :smiley:

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Hi @lien
Thank you in advanced for your kind cooperation.
May I ask you what is the reason of this policy?
How long should to be memriser to can download the courses free?
Is there any manager who inclines to answer to us?
Is there any way to ask Memrise to change policy to what like before?
Is it important for any one there that many users are unsatisfied? what is their reaction about it?

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30

Hi guys, I feel I should put things into perspectives. All that free community spirit has to get into perspective.

Any app, with such an image and such growth has to become professional and have a business plan. It is acceptable I trust to understand that after the free development years, at loss or on the back of personal or financial investments, an app needs to reach an economical level. The Pro membership is Memrise’s future. It is a choice against advertisement, and personally I prefer it.

It is a shame that for teachers, we can not encourage our students to revise all the time. But they can practice at home or so many public places… I decided months ago to pay my subscription to encourage Memrise in its development, I regret it took some facilities away from all to reach its economical viability but I accept it. I guess we are not enough Pro members to make it viable.

Now I don’t believe that this group of people is money driven, but I do think that they want to keep their baby alive. This baby is now walking and growing, has reached a certain age where it needs more food and more care to carry on. One can not chose teaching or encourage teaching/learning as a mean to great wealth. It is a duty driven ambition, a giving rather than a taking thing. So I keep faith. (Until they sell the app to G**gle or Yahoo… :fearful: and prove me wrong, at least)

So maybe the conversation would be more constructive, on another thread, if we were to discuss what we are willing to accept to carry on with Memrise in our life. We have done a lot of taking from the app these last years/months. Some are lucky to have arrived early and have some privileges (like free download) and are surely grateful.

Gratitude can be so underrated nowadays.

I feel, I am OK because I am Pro, I have been with the app a long time and I don’t get frustrated by the new layout. So I could just keep out but I feel also I need to give some perspective to the less patient ones.

So here is the question :
To have free downloads, what would you accept?

I would cringe at the idea personally but some users are used to it and could accept it.

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@sircemloud, you forgot to mention “my” perspective. I don’t like the app, but this is not the issue I want to emphasise. The issue is the team did not say a clear word before making the change. They should have announced this change by using very big drums.

Of course memrise is not here to keep alive schools from poor neighbourhoods/with low means - the schools could try to pay a membership fee or soemthing. But I suspect many a public and very poor school tried to motivate and help their pupils with memrise… and I suspect the team knew this, otherwise they would not have changed the terminology (remember that Ben said at a certain moment that some users complained about not understanding “watering”/“planting”/“items” - some users called the change at the time a “dumbing down”) and then gamified everything.

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What about a one off fee to download a course ? Much better than a subscription. If I buy a language book I only have to pay for it once as well.

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HOW exactly would they do that???

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@amanda-norrsken sorry, I am not sure I understand your question? you mean: how the team can announce users about big impeding changes? don’t they have a blog, a forum, a dashboard to post things on? aren’t they sending emails to remind about this and that (in fact, i don’t know if they still send all sort of mails, as I deactivated that option)

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Hello @lien
I have been using the Memrise mobile app to learn A1 French since July 2015,logged on by Facebook, and have reached to rank of Memmoth.
As you can see, i am not a new member, yet am shreded of the ability to download courses on my phone.