What’s New in Fresh Cards 3

If you’re coming from Fresh Cards 2, thank you for using the app.

A lot has changed. Fresh Cards 3 is a complete rewrite — same idea (spaced-repetition flashcards that sync between your Mac and iPhone), but rebuilt from the ground up. The study flow, the sync, and the user interface have all changed.

Under the hood, the way your cards and study history are stored has also been redesigned. The goal: faster and more reliable sync, better efficiency, and room for features we couldn’t fit before — like richer Anki deck import (coming in a later update).

This page is a tour of the differences. Some things are new, some have been reshaped, and a few familiar features are temporarily missing while we rebuild them in a better form.

Upgrading from Fresh Cards 2

If you are a current Fresh Cards user, your app will be updated automatically. You don’t have to do anything. It’s the same app on the App Store, not a new listing, and your Pro license carries over as Premium (see Licensing changes below).

A few practical notes:

Rollout is gradual

Apple rolls the update out to devices over about a week, so not everyone sees it the same day.

If you’d rather not wait, open the App Store, find Fresh Cards, and tap Update to force it through immediately.

Nothing to do on first launch

The app detects your existing data and migrates it to the new format automatically. There’s no export/import dance to do yourself.

Sync may look slow at first

After the migration, the first sync to iCloud can take a while as the new data lands on Apple’s servers.

If you have a lot of cards, media, or a large study history, the app’s initial sync may take a bit longer. iCloud might temporarily throttle the sync speed if it detects there’s a lot of data. If this happens, you’ll see a “Sync may be slower than normal…” message. This is expected and resolves on its own.

For more detail, see Upgrading from an earlier version in the Troubleshooting section.

OS requirements have shifted slightly

At a Glance

If you want the short version of what’s changed, here’s a quick summary:

The rest of this page expands on each of these.

The Big Shifts

Streamlined Playlist

The playlist view has had its controls reorganized.

Filters used to be scattered. They’re now consolidated behind a single filter button.

The default filter is the new Study Queue, which on its own replaces a lot of the back-and-forth you used to do between different filter modes.

Resizable Study Queue

The Study Queue is a per-deck daily slice of cards — split into a “Study Queue” section (what’s left to study today) and a “Studied Today” section (what you’ve already done).

The default size of the Study Queue is capped by a deck setting, so you can limit the number of cards you see per day. You can nudge that cap up or down on the fly with the +/− buttons on the Study Queue header. Instead of switching filter modes to control how much you study, you just resize the queue. See Playlist.

Folders in the Deck Browser

One of the most-requested features from Fresh Cards 2.

The deck browser (the sidebar) now supports a folder system — organize decks by subject, by grade level, or whatever you want.

Much more livable once you accumulate more than a handful of decks. See Deck Browser.

Simpler Redaction

Card redaction is now a two-state toggle instead of a three-way cycle.

Fresh Cards 2 cycled through: front-only, front-and-back, redacted. Fresh Cards 3 collapses this to either redacted or showing front and back.

An eye button on the playlist toggles it. Cards in the Study Queue are redacted by default; Studied Today is always revealed.

Study Session Summary Screen

Study sessions now open with a summary screen — a redacted list of what’s queued for the session and a START button.

Between batches you come back to this screen, where the cards you just studied are revealed with checkmarks (right) or X’s (wrong). This gives you a natural pause point instead of dropping you straight back to the deck.

Wrong-Cards Review on Demand

Cards you mark wrong are no longer automatically tacked onto the end of the current batch.

Instead, if at least one card in the session was marked wrong, a button appears on the session summary to re-visit those cards. Tapping it gathers every card marked wrong in the session so far and starts reviewing them as a new batch.

The change gives you control: you can chase down your misses immediately, save them for the end of the session, or stop and come back to them later — instead of having them silently extend a batch you thought you were finished with.

New-Card Preview

New cards now get a dedicated Preview step the first time they show up in a session.

In Fresh Cards 2, a card you’d never seen before was presented with the same right/wrong UI as every other card — so people would inevitably mark a brand-new card “wrong” simply because they hadn’t seen the back yet. That was confusing and a little discouraging.

In Fresh Cards 3, the first appearance of a new card uses a Preview UI: the front of the card with a FLIP button, and after revealing the back, a CONTINUE button. No grading. The card then reappears later in the same batch as a normal test, so the preview has a chance to land first. It feels less like a pop quiz and more like the app teaching you the card before checking that it stuck.

Full-Session Shuffle

Study sessions now have a shuffle option on the session summary that mixes all cards in the playlist together. This is useful when you want to break out of the playlist’s default order and just go.

Side Challenges

New in 3: per-deck Side Challenges you can toggle in the study session settings:

They mix in active recall without changing the underlying card.

New Ways to Capture Cards

Adding a card no longer requires opening the app.

Fresh Cards 3 ships with:

See Capturing Cards from Other Apps.

A Better Stats Screen

The stats screen has been redesigned. The calendar heatmap is still here (it was in Fresh Cards 2 too), and the following are new:

The forecast gives you a better feel for how fresh your memory is: lots of cards due now or soon means a lot of studying coming up; cards spread far into the future means you’re in good shape.

See Stats & Streaks.

A Better Sync Engine

The sync engine has been rebuilt on Apple’s CloudKit infrastructure end-to-end.

It’s more reliable, recovers better from interruptions, and is now free for all users (it used to be Pro-only).

First sync to a fresh device can take a while as your full history comes down, but after that it’s continuous in the background. See Sync & Devices.

UI Improvements Throughout

The UI has been refreshed across the app — card editor, deck list, study view, settings.

One change worth calling out: the playlist’s bottom buttons have been laid out like a media player, with PLAY in the middle, PLUS on the left (to add a card), and STATS on the right. The familiar shape makes the controls easier to scan and remember at a glance.

Some other things are in different places than you remember. The numbered sections in the Help index are the fastest way to re-orient.

Licensing Changes

Pro Is Now Called Premium

Pure rename. If you had a Pro license in Fresh Cards 2, you’ll see it as a Premium license in Fresh Cards 3 — same purchase, same unlocks, nothing to repurchase.

Free Users Get More

This is probably the biggest change for non-paying users.

In Fresh Cards 2, the following were all paid features:

In Fresh Cards 3, free users get everything. The only limits are Bulk Import (Premium-only) and a cap of 100 cards across all decks.

If friends or family bounced off Fresh Cards 2 because of those walls, this is the version to recommend. See Premium.

Things That Work the Same

Most of what made Fresh Cards 2 feel like Fresh Cards 2 is still here:

Smaller Niceties

A few smaller additions worth knowing about:

Things That Are Missing or Changed

A few features from Fresh Cards 2 aren’t in 3. Some are coming back in a better form; one is gone for good.

Anki .apkg import — temporarily disabled

It’s coming back in a better form that handles more of Anki’s note types and media cleanly.

For now, if you have an Anki deck to bring across, the best path is to export it as CSV from Anki and use Fresh Cards 3’s CSV import.

Deck export — coming back

There is currently no way to export decks out of Fresh Cards 3, and we want to acknowledge up front that this is a real gap.

Being able to get your data out of an app is important, and shipping the rewrite without it is not where we want to stay. Export is on the roadmap and will be added back.

Thanks for bearing with us on this one.

Match Game — removed

Match Game was hard to support well once cards could hold many different types of content (images, audio, math, longer text), and the experience suffered in too many edge cases.

If this is a feature you’d like to see come back, let me know by emailing support or using one of the contact options at the bottom of the page.

If a feature you relied on isn’t covered here, it’s worth a note to support — knowing what people miss most shapes what gets rebuilt next.

Tell Us What You Think

Fresh Cards 3 is a rewrite, and the UI in particular has moved around quite a bit. If something feels off, broken, or missing, we want to hear about it. The feedback shapes what gets fixed and what gets built next.

Where to Go Next