Memrise, stop "improving" Android app. You're bad at it

[Hombre_sin_nombre]

For starters, I like Memrise very much. Maybe I can even call myself a hardcore fan. Memrise app for Android is clearly one of my favourite apps and I’m using it everyday for almost two years and a half. I think all of the other language/memorizing apps are not even staying close to it.

But, guys, what are you doing to your app recently is a sheer disaster. Last year you have invented Ziggy and only user’s avalanche of criticism forced you to bid him farewell. But you ain’t learned nothing from that story and it’s just one example from many others alike. Practically every big update is bringing something terrible to the users.

Some time ago you started to roll out a pack of the brand new improvements. At first tips notifications disappeared. OK, I can live with this. Then you changed “continue” button, which lead to overlapping in the bottom of the app during learning sessions. OK, it’s just some inconvenience, but not the end of the world.

The latest update: you have decided to change the size of the flashcards. Now screen consists of two parts: 1) new word takes about 2/3 with emptiness around it (hey, what happened to the other lines, pronunciation and whatnot?) 2) translation of this word which takes about 1/3 in the bottom and sometimes you should to scroll down to see what you are learning.

It’s a fudging invention, hats off, guys! Seriously, now we have to do more movements to learn new words. This is a very cool “improvement”.

You know, there are proverbs like “The best is the enemy of the good” and “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” you should have heard of and maybe think about them.

Anyways, there is a lot of some real bugs in the app, why don’t you fix them instead? Why there is no search button in the courses? (just an idea)

Also, why don’t you decide once and for all: are we flying into outer space or just planting some pretty flowers here on Earth?

[LangAddict (Adrian)]

For anyone wondering, this is how it looks like now.

In a way, I kind of like this look…but, God, why did they make the audio button so big? Also, when you have no audio file, you’re pretty much left with empty space. So these are my suggestions:

1. make it smaller / revert back to the good-old days
2. yes, search button please
3. would be nice if we could edit our own courses in the app instead of going into the browser version which is not mobile-friendly at all

But these stuff are not likely to happen, because Memrise looks to make their app “prettier” for the kiddies. Kids don’t care about editing.

[mthierst]

I guess you have to give them credit for trying to move things forward, but I have to agree that there are ways too many changes coming through which feel not fully thought through, and badly implemented and/or tested. making new features options (ie with a switch to turn them on/off) would take some of the aggravation out of it

[ltkaitana]

Agree with all of the above. I’m also experiencing a problem where audio is autoplaying even though I have all audio settings turned off. Incredibly frustrating!

[Hombre_sin_nombre]

Thank you for the screenshot. Seems like your smartphone screen is bigger and here it looks not so bad, at least you don’t have to scroll. But that’s exactly the point which developers ignored: not everyone has screens that size.

[jklingen9290]

I don’t think this post belongs in “bugs”.

Also, speaking as a software developer, I would completely ignore this post. It seems more like you’re angry about any change at all and it’s very hard to figure out what your specific complaint is. If you want them to pay attention (which actually seems unlikely because I’ve been waiting more than month for them to respond about an actual usage bug) you should probably repost and focus on the current problem and why is feusteao to you. Be clear, don’t use idioms, don’t “classify” yourself as a user (you’re on the course forum, you’re already more involved than %99 of users) and include screenshots. You could even use a drawing app to highlight what the issue is.

Cheers

[Hombre_sin_nombre]

Hey man, I’m all for changes, betterment, perfection and whatnot, but changes shouldn’t be made for sake of changes itself. That is to say, not to just mill the wind or to plough the sands (sorry for idioms). There must be some kind of demand for them, they should bring something good and useful.

And most of all changes shouldn’t break things that are working just fine. When the user is doing one or two more swipes in the place where was none, then this is not a positive change. It’s a screw up.

[chipote]

They also removed your wrong answer after a mistake, if I make a mistake I like to see where it was (bonus improvement: highlight the difference between your answer and the correct answer)
Which is sometimes not correct, there should be an easy way to report and fix incorrect words, I just ignore them.

Also I don’t like automatic validation when you wrote the correct answer, what if you were unsure?
You have to be sure and then validate, otherwise you can try every variation you think of.
Also proposing syllables help too much.

[GabrieleCramer-Knebe (Gabriele Cramer Knebel2d)]

@MemriseSupport, @MemriseMatty, @Joshua
I really dont like the latest improvement. Now I have to scroll to see more. And I thought I had a big screen, I have Samsung S9.

Why is that blue field so ridiculously big. Bigger is not necessarily better. I am learning japanese and the kanjis are still so small to decipher and read. I learned a lot of radicals and if I can’t figure out the kanji I like to take it apart and very often I can decipher the meaning. But if they are so small it’s difficult.

Like @chipote already mentioned the wrong answer check was removed. This is absolutely not helpful. I dont like to be in the dark not knowing where the mistake is.

Please, stop improving the courses and concentrate on getting the problems fixed.

And yes, @jklingen9290 I am angry at the changes. There are too many changes and if you keep reading the posts you should have realized that long time users complain that something that started out good is going the way users don’t like.

[LangAddict (Adrian)]

For the small kanji issue, you can turn “magnification” in your phone’s options and it will zoom in when you triple-tap. Other than that, it all depends on Memrise’s judgement, unfortunately.

[Hombre_sin_nombre]

You can still turn off automatic detection. Look into settings on your profile page (gear-wheel in the right top corner).

[Hombre_sin_nombre]

Also, I have to report that you need to make an additional swipe to see mems and one more swipe to get back to the initial screen containing word/phrase. I didn’t say about it the first place, because I haven’t seen it at that moment. Again, it does not look like a good thing.

Somewhere deep down there’s a mem on this screenshot.

[Olaf.Rabbachin]

FWIW, I suppose the reason behind the change was that what’s now being covered by the speaker image is a native video when available for an item. I only came across this once while working on “difficult words”. This is the one and only place where the change makes very much sense. Sadly it doesn’t in all other places, so I rather perceive this as being a bug.

[lampasonavito]

Totally agree, removing the possibility to check what a mistake consisted of is an incredibly dumb move on the part of memrise

[Olaf.Rabbachin]

After another session I do think the idea (!) behind this is a general improvement. If there’s a “native” video you can see both the video and swipe left/right to get the (regular) audio file.
FWIW, it seems to not depend on the screen size. I use a tablet (8-10", unsure) with Memrise and Duo, the appearance there is pretty much exactly like the screenshot further up.
And there’s another (minor) problem: the author of a mem seems to be formatted wrongly. Obviously, the HTML-tag isn’t closed properly. So much for thoroughness …

[FishSlap]

A couple of problems I’ve encountered:
In an audio course (246 French Conversation and Composition - by clotstate - Memrise) it works when watering, but when reviewing new phrases instead of playing the phrase, it just shows memrise.android.memrisecompanion.core.models.learnable.AudioUrl@ so there’s no way to hear what you’re going to be tested on.

Also, on courses with longer phrases that help teach word order, the words end up underneath the words I have already added to the phrase, making it impossible to see the remaining words and difficult to touch on the tiny bit that is visible without removing previous words.

[JoelleSmits (Joëlle Smits)]

The update might be annoying for language courses, but courses with pictures are now impossible to learn

Why use picures if you can now see the link? This occurs in all picture courses so far. How nice that i’ve to take my computer to learn this courses or to use difficult words. Best update so far!

[GabrieleCramer-Knebe (Gabriele Cramer Knebel2d)]

@MemriseMatty, @Joshua

There seems to be more problems that needs to be solved with the latest update. See above comments.

[FishSlap]

I noticed the same thing last night on an American Sign Language course. And as I mentioned above, a French listening course has a similar problem.

[primehalo]

There’s also a bug in the Japanese language course where instead of giving the translation of a kanji it just shows the kanji: