Super Duolingo, The "FREE" Language Learning App... Review

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Poor Educational Design

1. The app is designed to make you lose hearts at the slightest opportunity.
2. Simple mistakes like a misspelled letter shouldn't completely deprive you of a heart.
3. Lives aren't a real educational mechanism. In the paid version, you have unlimited lives, which shows that its purpose isn't educational but commercial.
4. In the lessons, sometimes if you make a mistake, you're given other lessons instead of the ones you missed. It's very narrow-minded about errors, especially on Android.
5. You're not getting a certificate; pronunciation mostly cancels itself.
6. It doesn't remember the last typed or defined items.
7. It doesn't have drag and drop in texts (on Android).
8. We make mistakes if we type in Spanish or other Android keyboards.

Excessive Monetization and Pay-to-Win

1. Local currency: Diamonds. They charge for everything.
2. They force you to participate in a competition with a prize of 130 crystals.
3. They want you to pay 2,000 crystals to stay in the competition.
4. Typical game where those who pay have more options.
5. In the lessons, there are classes that are only for paying users.
6. False advertising: it says it's free to use, but it's actually paid.
7. Everything should be postponable: Duolingo Plus, experience multipliers. It's harassment to force you to spend 30 continuous minutes in the app.
8. They impose Super Duolingo on you: every benefit should be optional, not imposed.
9. It's not free. The product is you, or they want you to be the product, so you'll see more ads or keep paying.
10. Paid app with a free mode. You can't say it's free if it's focused on paying users.
11. Gmail is a free app; you can use its main features without feeling pressured like you do on Duolingo.

Lives and Penalties System

1. 6-hour lives.
2. Six hours for hearts.
3. They take away several hearts for the same mistake.
4. They take away hearts multiple times in the same question.
5. Lives from ads are erratic: on iOS they're always bad now, and on Android they recently reinstated them.
6. There used to be no option to recover lives on Android.
7. You had an option to practice with all your lives, now only one. (This isn't a feature, it's a pressure strategy.)
8. Whether you have 1 or 4 hearts, you have to pay the same amount (350 or 500).
9. If it's a game, why don't you get your hearts back when you close the level? You should be charged if you fail, not if you win.
10. Technical Issues and Usability

Fixations are very forced.

1. Suspicious users.
2. It has runtime errors, especially when you close the app at the end of the lesson and it shows an ad.
3. Experience multiplier for time: They tell you you have it, but they don't show it or they don't apply it in the lesson path.
4. The 2x experience multiplier overlaps the 1.5x without warning.

Scoring and Competition System

1. Scoring by time.
2. Multi-option experience by time (but poorly implemented).
3. Practice option limited to a single life.
4. Misleading advertising to recover hearts by paying.
5. To leave the league, you have to do it from the website; they clearly don't want you to. Who uses the Duolingo website?

Intrusive and Manipulative Advertising

1. Half the ads are for Duolingo Plus.
2. Duo ads often have forced audio.
3. Gaining lives through ads is sometimes unavailable on Android.
4. Crystals aren't useful for anything other than recharging lives; it's better to use ads.
5. Things cost more crystals on iOS.