Focus September 2026

5 apps for teaching yourself something

Teaching yourself something means being the whole school at once: the lesson, the drill, the notebook, the attendance and the attention span. These five take one job each — a course that works problems with you, cards that come back just before you forget, a place for the notes, a reason to show up, and a timer that does not punish you for looking away.

The apps for teaching yourself something are Brilliant, Focus Train, AnkiMobile Flashcards, Goodnotes and Habitica. I built Focus Train; the other 4 are other developers’ apps.

MiaAppLog— an iOS developer who reviews other people’s apps
Published September 2026 · apps and prices last checked 13 October 2026

Four stars is my score for how well an app answers this moment. An app I built gets four and a half — that is a rule, not a comparison. The App Store’s own average is on each card beside it.

1. 

   Brilliant

   ★★★★★★★★★★4.0 · Free · Education · App Store 4.7 (32,832)

   Brilliant teaches math, coding, data and physics as problems you work through with a tutor that sees where you are stuck and can sketch on your screen. Built for understanding rather than memorising formulas.

   Skip it if your subject is biology or chemistry, or you want to pay by the month: it is math and computing only, the annual subscription is the sticking point in most reviews, and some paid lessons contain errors.

   Official site ↗More lists with Brilliant

   
2. 

   Focus Train Editor’s pick

   ★★★★★★★★★★4.5 · Free · Productivity · App Store 5.0 (5)

   Focus Train turns a study session into a train ride: board, and the train rolls while you work. Look away and it simply waits at the platform. By the end of the week there is a map of where your attention went.

   App Store ↗More lists with Focus Train

   
3. 

   AnkiMobile Flashcards

   ★★★★★★★★★★4.0 · $24.99 · Education · App Store 4.0 (2,346)

   AnkiMobile is the mobile companion to Anki, the free open-source spaced-repetition program, written by its lead developer. Paid once, priced like desktop software, with free sync to the computer version. Beware the look-alikes with Anki in the name.

   Skip it if you plan to build decks on the phone: the interface is the constant complaint — clunky, hard to make cards on, and browsing shared decks means going through Safari.

   Official site ↗More lists with AnkiMobile Flashcards

   
4. 

   Goodnotes

   ★★★★★★★★★★4.0 · Free · Productivity · App Store 4.7 (459,424)

   Goodnotes holds handwritten notes and marked-up PDFs — the textbook, the worked problems — plus a mind map on an infinite canvas, and AI that summarises what you have captured.

   Skip it if you bought an earlier version: the move to a subscription and metered AI credits is the sorest point in the reviews, with crashes and lost notes close behind.

   Official site ↗More lists with Goodnotes

   
5. 

   Habitica

   ★★★★★★★★★★4.0 · Free · Productivity · App Store 4.3 (3,463)

   Habitica turns the daily practice into a retro RPG: check the session off in real life and your avatar earns gold and experience. Parties let you team up with friends for accountability and fight foes by completing tasks.

   Skip it if you need the checklist itself to be reliable: reviewers describe taps not registering and the app lagging, and the guilds that made the community worth joining were removed.

   Official site ↗More lists with Habitica

   

Focus Train is one of mine — everything else on this list is someone else’s app. How that works.