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.