iOS · Indie app
Flashwords
Boost your vocabulary in five minutes a day.
Flashwords is a vocabulary-first language app for adults — daily quizzes, smart spaced repetition, and full offline access across seven languages. No grammar drills, no cartoon owl, no streak shame.
Features
What it does.
Seven languages, real words
Spanish, English, French, Italian, German, Portuguese, Turkish. Thousands of words organized around how people actually talk — not random vocab packs.
Smart spaced repetition
The app learns which words you struggle with and brings them back until they're locked in. Daily sessions stay short and honest.
Fully offline
Practice on a flight, on the subway, anywhere. The whole word bank works without an internet connection.
Calm, not childish
Progress, statistics, and gentle daily reminders — built for 25-to-45-year-olds who want momentum without manipulation.
Screens
A look inside.
Story
Why Flashwords exists.
Flashwords nearly didn’t survive its third year.
It started in 2018 as a side project — a list of words I needed to memorize while learning English, with a quiz screen bolted on. For two years I shipped updates between full-time jobs, watching the download numbers creep up and the revenue stay near zero. By 2021 I’d half-convinced myself it was a hobby that had outgrown me.
Then a teacher in Spain emailed: “My 14-year-old daughter has been using your app every day for a year. I have no idea how she found it. Thank you.”
I read that email five times.
What kept me going was the realization that the people who’d found Flashwords on their own had found something the big language apps weren’t offering. Not gamification, not grammar trees, not streak shame. Just words you’ll actually use, organized around real life, with spaced repetition that forgets nicely.
So the app stayed narrow. No story mode. No AI conversation partner. No mascot. Five minutes a day, and whether you do it or skip it, you’ll be fine.
The 2025 redesign was the first time in seven years I let myself rewrite the interface. Warmer palette, calmer onboarding — all of it came out of one observation: the people downloading the app aren’t 18 anymore. The original audience grew up. So did the design.
What hasn’t changed: nobody on the screen is yelling at you to come back.
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