Is Skritter still being actively developed?

First off, let me start of by saying that Skritter is an amazing app. I’ve logged many hours on Skritter, and feel it’s still one of the best Chinese learning tools out there.

That being said, I recently returned to studying Chinese after taking a couple of years off, and found that Skritter is virtually unchanged, and has all the appearance of an abandoned platform. Back in the early days of Skritter, it seemed like the developers were adding new features left and right. Now, however, I come back after almost two years off, and it all looks the same. There’s still an unfinished web Skritter 2.0 that looks nice but lacks features, alongside the original Skritter 1.0 where you still have to go to when you need something that Skritter 2.0 lacks. There’s a beta version for Android that, well, is still very much a beta version for Android. It works OK, though the characters are still ridiculously small on my Samsung tablet. The IOS phone version rocks, and still seems to get the most love, even having study features that the web version lacks, however, there’s still not a native iPad port. Having a massive portrait iPhone layout on a 12.9 inch iPad Pro screen actually looks pretty silly, I would have thought they would have added native iPad support with a landscape mode ages ago.

There are a few new minor tweaks that weren’t around two years ago. The learning mode is nice, though only offered on one of the two web interfaces. With all of these stagnant, unchanging, half-finished versions, all with varying features, it just feels like there is no active development going on anymore. Is Skritter content to simply ride off into the sunset, collecting monthly fees, with perhaps the occasional bug fix, or is this really actually still an actively developed project? Again, I love Skritter, I’m just really disappointed in the lack of progress over the last couple of years.

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You’re not alone to feel that way : Skritter Mobile Beta Updates (see the posts since October)
However the developers claim to be working on yet another version that would go public as a beta on December 1st. In the meantime I’ve suspended my subscription to the service since I shouldn’t have to pay to beta test an unifished app.

We hear you loud and clear. Skritter is very much an actively developed project! We’re working on a major update which is why there’s been some silence especially in the past month or so, however we plan to have the update available in the beginning of December (as @dedebenui mentioned). Please keep in mind that though the original site and apps haven’t seen major updates recently, they’re very stable and can be used if you don’t want to mess around with a beta app! It’s true that some things like kana handwriting and teaching mode aren’t available on the original apps, however that’s why we’re working so hard on getting the beta version stable and to unify the clients. (The beta version does support landscape on an iPad, by the way)!

Sorry for causing these feelings, though they are well understood.

Appreciate you letting us know. We hope to have ya back soon when we’re out finally out of this seemingly endless beta process. Honestly, the light at the end of the tunnel is getting brighter and brighter from our end and we can wait to share what we’ve been cooking up!

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