To our beloved language learners across the world—we are crushed to announce that Reji will be no more starting from March 31, 2021. Why? In a nutshell, Team Gikken has decided to shift focus to our most popular product: Mate Translate. Reji simply did not accrue enough revenue to maintain itself.
Gikken has matured greatly over the past year. We gradually came to understand that our attention cannot be spread thin. To create as beautiful and impactful a product as Mate, we must fully dedicate ourselves to it and not be distracted by other projects that do not capture enough interest from our community. Mate is approaching 1 million monthly active users—we don't want to ignore this. We want to feed the flame, making Mate the very best it can possibly be.
We built Reji in May 2018 to accompany Mate as a language learning tool. There was a burgeoning market for flashcard apps and we knew we could design the best if we followed our brand ethos of beautiful, functional, minimal tools that cared about user privacy while relying on our own transparency.
At its height, Reji had 25,000 language learners building their vocabularies across 48 popular languages. We were delighted to hear success stories across Twitter and in emails from users. As multilinguists ourselves, we cherish this small contribution to a large community of self-learners. Unfortunately, there came a decline. Duolingo's Tinycards shut down not so long ago. We attempted to divert their lost audience to Reji to no avail. The edu category is tough enough to break into! Now here we are, having to make the tough decision to decommission one of our core products.
We know there are many folks out there still using Reji every day. Don't stop learning. Pick up Mate to translate wherever you are. Take language courses. Read books, watch movies, and have casual conversations with native speakers. You'll be speaking another tongue before you know it.
Thank you for learning with us.
Team Gikken
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What happens next?
As long as Reji is downloaded on your phone before we shut it down, you'll be able to access it indefinitely. You will not be able to re-download it again as it will be removed from the App Store.
Reji will be removed from the App Store on March 31, 2021.
Sharing decks, uploading custom images, and CSV import will stop working.
If you're an active user, you'll want to export your decks to a CSV to import elsewhere or keep handy in case you find another learning solution.
If you purchased Reji in the past two weeks, you can request a refund here.