Today I'm giving up a 665 day streak in Duolingo. I've removed the app from my phone. Duolingo is still a helpful tool for many and they have potential to become great again. Unfortunately, the trend in their recent changes has encouraged me to leave. I'm mostly writing this to warn myself about practices that can drive customers away.
I didn't mind when Duolingo started showing ads. I knew they had to do it eventually. They even did a good job of showing ads in predictable locations and using ads of relatively high quality. I anticipated a subscription model allowing me to pay $1 per month to remove the ads and expected no other functionality for my subscription. Unfortunately, the subscription costs 10x more than I was willing to pay. For reference, Duolingo charges $9 per month. Netflix charges $7 per month and provides much greater value.
No big deal. I'll skip the subscription and just look at the ad after each lesson. I'm sure that 90% of users do the same thing. Duolingo doesn't seem content with that, so they randomly move the location of the "close this ad" button on each page. Sometimes it's in the top left corner. Sometimes it's in the lower right corner. This inconsistency is disrespectful. It's playing games with my time in an apparent attempt to manipulate me into clicking their ads or subscription button. If most users are going to skip the ads, the "close this ad" button should be predictable and convenient (on the bottom where a thumb can quickly reach it).
It was annoying, but I was willing to live with it. Duolingo has to make money. They're being a little pushy about it, but I can overlook that. Then they changed the "strengthen my skills" button so that it only performs a timed practice. I thought, "maybe they've seen that this produces better results, so I'll try it". After using it for 2-3 weeks, I found myself skipping any question which took longer than 1-2 seconds to answer (listening comprehension, free text response). The new rules of the game were encouraging me to learn a language less effectively. For people whose focus is conversational speech, it might make sense to practice under time pressure. My goal has always been reading comprehension. In that context, time is not an issue. I can spend as much time as I want on a German Wikipedia page and nobody will care.
Android has always been a second-class citizen for Duolingo. Useful features come to iPhone first and often don't make it to Android for months or years. It's no big deal since the core functionality is available on Android. Duolingo makes it very clear that they're trying to hire an Android developer. They've been trying for as long as I can remember. A couple days ago, I installed an update to the Android app. Even though I only use the app for 10 minutes each morning, it now consumes 9% of my battery each day.
In a market for user attention that's so competitive, you really have to play at the top of your game. Anything pushy or disrespectful can have large costs. Repeated minor issues like this can push a user away. I hope I can remember that as I work on software.
Duolingo. Thanks for 665 days of fun. Sorry that things didn't work out between us.
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