AiWords shipped its 3.1 update this August, and the current release notes assume you know how the app got here. You probably don't, and the honest version of the story is more interesting than a marketing timeline. This post walks the development history from the first commit in October 2024 to the present, version by version.
1.0 — the core loop (September 2025)
Work started in October 2024, and 1.0 reached the App Store in September 2025. The release already contained the shape of the app today: pick a vocabulary book by JLPT level, set a daily goal, study a mixed queue of new words and reviews, and check your statistics afterwards. It shipped with the Radio listening mode, multiple-choice review, and a free browse mode, plus the supporting cast — study settings, learning statistics, a profile with account management, in-app feedback, and the legal pages.
What 1.0 did not have is most of what people now associate with the app. No handwriting recognition, no typing mode, no study-time tracking, no Storycast. The spaced repetition engine was there from the start, though — the daily queue has always been scheduled per word, and that decision turned out to be the foundation everything else was built on.
2.0 — hands and ears (December 2025)
The 2.0 submission landed on December 11, 2025, closing a run of 175 commits since the first release. Two features headline it.
First, handwriting. In mid-October we integrated Google's ML Kit digital ink recognition as a native module and built Handwriting Practice around it: write the kana, and the app recognizes the strokes on the device. A keyboard-input mode with Japanese IME support joined it, giving learners two ways to produce words instead of only recognizing them.
Second, the app started keeping honest time. Global study-time tracking arrived, along with a timezone selector, a configurable daily reset, real data behind the statistics charts, and a Day Off button that protects your streak when life intervenes. The same update rebuilt the home screen around the daily queue, added automatic dark mode, avatar editing, a custom browse mode, and stronger quiz distractors fetched from a new API version. Account deletion — required for App Store guidelines and the right thing regardless — shipped in this cycle too.
One footnote: an early prototype of the AI story feature appeared internally in October 2025, under the name Storycast. It was not ready, and it was about to be rebuilt from scratch.
3.0 — Storycast, subscriptions, a new face (first half of 2026)
The 3.0 arc ran from December 2025 through the summer of 2026 and changed the app more than the previous two versions combined. The short version:
Storycast becomes real
In January 2026 the AI tab went live. The following month, Storycast's conversations moved from ordinary request/response calls to WebSocket streaming, so characters reply as they speak instead of after a pause. The component architecture was rebuilt in March, conversation history and review followed, and the feature grew its distinctive pieces one by one: multiple story routes per group, an undo button, voice mode at the end of March, a settings panel in April, learning-goal cards, a bilingual Story Article distilled from each conversation in May, the red-and-green Color Card study mode in June, and warm-up teaching cards with course phases in July.
Accounts and money
Guest login arrived in February 2026 so people can try the app before registering, and Sign in with Apple followed, with the full Apple authentication integration landing in late March. The same week, subscriptions launched as iOS in-app purchases — plan display, purchase, restore and cancellation — and the purchase machinery was migrated to StoreKit 2, the modern receipt handling being a precondition for sane subscription management.
A full redesign, and a full translation pass
Late March also brought the visual identity the app still carries: the neo-brutalist style with bold borders and hard shadows. In April that hardcoding was replaced by a proper design-token system with three selectable UI styles — Doodle, Professional and Flat & Elegant — and the study settings pages were redrawn to match. On the language side, Japanese and French joined the interface in March, followed by a sweep that removed every last hardcoded string; the app's copy now exists in eight languages.
The unglamorous work mattered as much: study records began uploading automatically when the app moves to the background, so a day's learning is no longer hostage to whether you remember to close the session properly.
Where that leaves us
The 3.1 update is the direct continuation of all this: the Profile rebuilt around the statistics 2.0 started collecting, the subscription paywall rebuilt on the plumbing 3.0 installed, and the Android package moved to the identity it will ship under on Google Play. That story has its own post: AiWords 3.1. And if you care less about versions and more about whether the reviews actually land at the right moment, start with how the review engine works.
Dates and feature attributions in this post are drawn from the app's development history. If you spot something that doesn't match your experience in a given version, tell us via the support page.