AnkiDroid Settings Guide 2026: How to Configure FSRS and Optimize Your Android Study Workflow

Why Default AnkiDroid Settings Are Holding You Back

If you downloaded AnkiDroid from the Google Play store, opened a shared deck, and started reviewing, you are studying with settings designed for a different era. The default algorithm — SM-2 — was created in 2006, long before modern machine learning was applied to memory scheduling. It works, but it works inefficiently. Most users running default SM-2 settings see retention rates between 65% and 75%, meaning they forget roughly one out of every three or four cards they have already studied.

The problem is not you. It is the scheduler. SM-2 uses a fixed ease factor and does not adapt to your individual memory patterns. The result is a review schedule that either shows cards too often (wasting time) or too late (causing forgetting). AnkiDroid itself is an excellent app — it has over 10 million downloads and a 4.8-star rating from more than 163,000 reviews on Google Play — but the out-of-box experience leaves a lot of performance on the table.

The fix is straightforward: switch to the FSRS algorithm and tune a handful of settings. FSRS (Free Spaced Repetition Scheduler) is a machine-learning model trained on approximately 700 million reviews from 20,000 users. Built directly into Anki 23.10+ and AnkiDroid, it replaces the rigid SM-2 logic with a scheduler that learns your personal forgetting curve. According to data cited by DocendoCards, students who switch to FSRS with optimized settings achieve 85–90% retention while reducing total reviews by 20–30% compared to SM-2 defaults. That is not a marginal improvement — it is the difference between drowning in reviews and staying comfortably ahead.

Step 1: Enable FSRS in Deck Options

Before you can tune anything, you need to flip the switch that activates FSRS. This is a one-time change applied to a deck preset, and it takes about ten seconds.

1. Open AnkiDroid and tap the three-dot menu in the top-right corner.
2. Navigate to Settings → Reviewing → Deck Options.
3. Select the deck preset you want to modify (or create a new one).
4. Scroll to the FSRS section and toggle "Enable FSRS" to on.
5. Tap "Save" and confirm the change.

That is it. FSRS is now active for every deck using that preset. The algorithm will begin scheduling reviews based on your actual performance data rather than the fixed SM-2 formula.

FSRS is not a black box. If you want to understand how it differs from SM-2 at the algorithmic level — why it produces shorter intervals for cards you know well and longer intervals for cards you struggle with — the Algorithm Divide: Why FSRS Is Making SM-2 Obsolete article provides a thorough breakdown.

Step 2: Set Desired Retention to 0.90

Desired retention is the single most impactful parameter in FSRS. It tells the algorithm what percentage of cards you want to recall correctly when they appear for review. A setting of 0.90 means you aim to remember 90% of your cards at the moment they are due.

The default FSRS retention in AnkiDroid is often set to 0.80 or 0.85 depending on the preset. Bumping it to 0.90 is the sweet spot for most learners. Here is why: at 0.90, you forget only 1 in 10 cards, which keeps your knowledge base solid without inflating review count to unsustainable levels. Drop to 0.80 and you forget twice as often — 2 in 10 cards — which means more relearning and more frustration. Go above 0.93 and the review burden climbs sharply because the algorithm schedules cards much sooner.

You can adjust this value based on your situation:

• Exam cramming: Raise to 0.93–0.95 in the 2–3 weeks before a high-stakes test. You will do more reviews, but you will also hold more information at the moment you need it.
• Casual or long-term learning: Lower to 0.85. The extra forgetting is acceptable because you have time to re-encounter material, and the reduced review load makes daily study more sustainable.
• Medical school or dense content: Stick with 0.90. The volume is already high, and dropping retention to save reviews will hurt your performance on cumulative exams.

To change it, go back to Deck Options → FSRS section and adjust the "Desired retention" slider. The change applies immediately to all decks using that preset.

Step 3: Configure Learning Steps for Your Study Type

Learning steps control what happens immediately after you see a new card for the first time. These are the short intervals that catch early forgetting and reinforce the card before it enters the long-term review schedule. Getting them right is critical because a card that slips through the learning phase with weak encoding will keep coming back as a leech.

For most learners, the recommended learning steps are:

To change learning steps in AnkiDroid: Deck Options → Steps → Learning steps. Enter the values separated by spaces (e.g., "1m 10m"). The "m" suffix means minutes; "d" means days.

If you are a medical student using the AnKing deck, the 15m 1d configuration is widely recommended within the community. The dedicated Anki Flashcard App Review for Medical Students covers this in more detail, including how to handle the massive card volumes that come with Step 1 prep.

Step 4: Set New Cards Per Day (Avoid the 9999 Trap)

The single most common mistake new AnkiDroid users make is setting "New cards/day" to 9999. It feels productive — you want to see everything, right now. But spaced repetition does not work that way. Every new card you introduce today becomes a review card tomorrow, then the day after, then a week later. The math is relentless.

According to the StudyCards AI guide, setting new cards to 9999 "defeats the purpose of spaced repetition and will result in a massive, unmaintainable review backlog within 2–4 weeks." The Oboeru medical school guide adds a concrete example: unsuspending 100 new cards per day leads to approximately 500 reviews per day within a month. That is not studying — that is firefighting.

Here is a sustainable framework for setting your new card limit:

• 10–20 new cards/day: Sustainable for most learners with 20–30 minutes of daily study. Your review load will stabilize at 100–200 cards/day.
• 20–50 new cards/day: Appropriate for dedicated students (medical school, intensive language courses) who can commit 45–90 minutes daily. Expect 200–500 reviews/day once the pipeline fills.
• 50–100 new cards/day: Only during dedicated exam prep periods (e.g., Step 1 dedicated study) when you can do 1–3 hours of Anki daily. This is a sprint, not a marathon.
• 0 new cards/day: Use this to stop the inflow when your review backlog exceeds 500 cards. Let the backlog shrink before adding new material.

To calculate your sustainable new card count, track your total daily review time for one week. Divide your available daily study minutes by 6 (each review takes roughly 6 seconds on average). That gives you a rough ceiling for total daily reviews. Then work backward: if you can handle 200 reviews/day and your current review load is 150, you have room for roughly 10–15 new cards/day.

Step 5: Maximum Interval and the Easy Button Warning

The maximum interval setting caps how far into the future a card can be scheduled. The default is 36500 days — roughly 100 years. With SM-2, this was a problem because the algorithm could push cards to absurdly long intervals after a few Easy presses, causing premature forgetting. With FSRS, the situation is different.

FSRS handles long intervals much better than SM-2 because it models the probability of recall directly. A card with a 6-month interval under FSRS is genuinely likely to be remembered at that point — the algorithm has calculated that probability based on your history. For this reason, keeping the maximum interval at 36500 days is fine for most FSRS users. The algorithm will not abuse it.

However, the Easy button remains a trap. Pressing Easy on a graduated card inflates its interval significantly. Under FSRS, Easy can push a card from a 21-day interval to 60+ days in a single press. If you press Easy frequently, you will create gaps in your review schedule that lead to forgetting. The LeanAnki guide advises against pressing Easy or Hard frequently for graduated cards — stick with Good as your default answer and reserve Easy for cards that feel genuinely over-reviewed.

If you prefer tighter control over maximum intervals, the LeanAnki approach recommends setting the maximum to 180–365 days instead of 36500. This prevents any single card from disappearing for years and forces the algorithm to reschedule it within a more predictable window. It is a valid alternative, but it reduces FSRS's ability to space truly well-known cards efficiently. Choose based on whether you value predictability or efficiency more.

Android-Specific Settings: Gestures, Widgets, Whiteboard, and More

AnkiDroid is not a desktop port — it is a separate app developed by its own volunteer community, and it includes features that desktop Anki does not have. These Android-specific tools can significantly improve your study efficiency on mobile, especially if you do most of your reviews on the go.

Swipe Gestures for Answering Cards

Tapping answer buttons works, but swiping is faster once you build the muscle memory. AnkiDroid supports configurable gestures for answering cards: swipe up, down, left, right, double touch, and touch zones. You can map each gesture to a specific answer button (Again, Hard, Good, Easy).

To configure gestures: Settings → Gestures. Enable gestures, then assign each answer button to a swipe direction. A common setup is:

• Swipe down → Again (you forgot)
• Swipe left → Hard
• Swipe right → Good (default answer)
• Swipe up → Easy

This layout mirrors the natural left-to-right difficulty gradient and keeps your thumb in the center of the screen. After a week of practice, you will answer cards without looking at the buttons.

Whiteboard for Active Recall

The whiteboard feature lets you draw on the screen during review — useful for working through a math problem, sketching a diagram, or writing out a chemical structure before flipping the card. Enable it in Settings → Reviewing → Whiteboard. Once active, a small pen icon appears during review. Tap it to draw, tap again to clear.

This is especially valuable for subjects that require active production rather than recognition. If you study anatomy, organic chemistry, or any field where drawing is part of the learning process, the whiteboard turns AnkiDroid into a mini practice tablet.

Night Mode and Automatic Sync

Night mode inverts the card colors to a dark theme, reducing eye strain during late-night study sessions. Enable it in Settings → Appearance → Night mode. You can also set it to follow your system theme automatically.

Automatic sync ensures your progress is backed up to AnkiWeb without manual intervention. In Settings → Synchronization, enable "Sync on app open" and "Sync on app close." The app uses a 10-minute cooldown to avoid syncing too frequently. This is critical if you also use Anki on a desktop computer — without auto-sync, you risk losing reviews or studying the same cards twice.

Progress Widget for Your Home Screen

AnkiDroid includes a home screen widget that shows your due card count and review progress at a glance. To add it: long-press your home screen → Widgets → find AnkiDroid → choose the widget size. The widget updates in real time and shows how many cards are due today, how many you have reviewed, and your average time per card.

This is a small feature, but it has an outsized effect on consistency. Seeing a widget with "45 cards due" every time you unlock your phone creates a gentle nudge to knock out a quick review session rather than opening social media.

Managing Review Load and Recovering from Backlogs

Even with perfect settings, life happens. You miss a weekend of reviews, then a week, and suddenly you are staring at 800 due cards. The temptation is to power through them all in one sitting — but that is a mistake. Cramming 800 reviews in a day burns you out and teaches you nothing because you are rushing through cards without engaging with them.

Here is a concrete recovery plan:

1. Set new cards to 0 immediately. Stop the inflow. You cannot dig out of a hole while someone keeps dumping dirt on your head.
2. For one week, do only reviews. No new cards. Aim to clear the backlog at a rate of 100–200 reviews per day, which takes most people 10–20 minutes.
3. If the backlog exceeds 1000 cards, use a filtered deck. Create a deck that shows only cards due in the last 7 days. Review those first, then expand to older cards.
4. Once reviews stabilize below 200 due, reintroduce new cards at half your previous rate. If you were doing 20/day, drop to 10/day for two weeks.
5. If you have an exam approaching, temporarily raise desired retention to 0.93 for the 2–3 weeks before the test. This increases review frequency but ensures you hold more information at exam time.

When Settings Aren't Enough: Fixing Leech Cards

A leech card is one that you fail repeatedly — typically defined as 8 or more lapses (Again presses) over its lifetime. When you encounter a leech, the instinct is to blame the settings: "I need to lower the interval modifier" or "I should increase my learning steps." In most cases, the problem is not the scheduler. It is the card.

Leech cards almost always share one of three flaws:

• The card is too vague. A front that says "What is mitosis?" with a back that lists six steps is not a flashcard — it is a textbook paragraph crammed into a card. Break it into multiple cards, each testing one step.
• The card lacks a mnemonic hook. Pure rote memorization without a story, image, or association is fragile. Add a mnemonic on the back of the card or embed a hint in the question.
• The card tests something you do not actually need to know. If you keep failing a card about a obscure enzyme in a pathway you rarely reference, suspend it. Not every fact is worth memorizing.

AnkiDroid flags leech cards automatically. Go to Deck Options → Leech action and set it to "Suspend card" rather than the default "Tag only." This way, when a card crosses the leech threshold, it is automatically removed from your review queue. You can review suspended cards later and decide whether to rewrite or discard them.

SM-2 vs FSRS: What the Numbers Actually Mean

If you have made it this far, you have already switched to FSRS. But it helps to see the before-and-after numbers side by side, so you know what to expect from the change.

The 20–30% reduction in reviews is not a marketing claim — it is a direct consequence of FSRS's ability to identify which cards you already know well and schedule them further into the future. Under SM-2, a card you have answered correctly five times in a row still gets reviewed on a fixed schedule. Under FSRS, that same card might not appear for three months, freeing up time for the cards you actually struggle with.

For a broader perspective on how AnkiDroid fits into the spaced repetition app landscape — including paid alternatives and their trade-offs — the Spaced Repetition Flashcard App Buyer's Guide covers the full field. And if you are building a complete study stack, the Category-Based Guide to Building Your 3-5 App Stack shows how AnkiDroid fits alongside note-taking tools, AI assistants, and planners.