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You finish a great book, feel changed by it, and a month later, you cannot name three things from it. Kern fixes that. Add a book by title and it creates a small deck of recall cards. Non-fiction gets the core ideas. Fiction gets characters, turns, and the moments that mattered. No highlights, no note exports, no writing cards yourself. Reviews come back on a spaced schedule timed to catch each one right before you forget it. Works for paper and library books. No streaks. Two books are free.
Hi Hunters, Josip here.
I am an iOS developer from Croatia. Fourteen years in. I led the iOS side of the Philips Home Safety app, spent seven years on client work through Toptal, and these days I build Bluetooth IoT apps by day and my own apps before work and at night. Kern is my fourth on the App Store.
Why I built it: I would read a great book, feel genuinely changed by it, and a month later I could barely name three things from it. Highlighting did not help, because I never went back to the highlights. And half of my reading is paper books and library books, where there are no highlights to export in the first place.
So Kern starts from the one thing you always have: the title. Add a book, get a small deck of recall cards, and review them on a spaced schedule that brings each card back right before you would forget it. Active recall plus spacing, which are two of the most replicated findings in learning research, with the setup work removed.
It handles fiction too, with a different kind of card. Non-fiction cards ask about ideas and arguments. Fiction cards ask about characters, turning points, and the moments that stayed with you. Same mechanism, different questions.
One thing I decided early: no streaks, no badges, no guilt screens. You review for a few minutes when it matters, then the app leaves you alone. An app about memory should not be trying to occupy your attention.
First two books are free, which is enough to know whether the mechanism works for you.
I will be here all day. I would especially love feedback from anyone who has used Anki or Readwise seriously, because Kern makes different tradeoffs than both and I want to hear where those tradeoffs pinch.
Thank you for having me.
Josip
Added a novel I read last month and it pulled out the minor character whose name I kept forgetting. Nice that it works for paper books too, since I borrow most of mine from the library.
Love the no-streaks decision and the spaced recall timing sounds spot on. One thing that would seal it for me: an optional shareable link for a deck, so a book club or a few friends can review the same cards together without each person starting from scratch.
The "no streaks" choice is so refreshing, and the spaced schedule logic sounds like it actually respects how memory works.
Tried it with a nonfiction book last week and the recall cards actually nailed the main ideas without me doing anything. The spaced schedule feels gentle too, no guilt-tripping streaks. Solid concept.
About Kern on Product Hunt
“Spaced repetition for the books you read”
Kern was submitted on Product Hunt and earned 12 upvotes and 9 comments, placing #46 on the daily leaderboard. You finish a great book, feel changed by it, and a month later, you cannot name three things from it. Kern fixes that. Add a book by title and it creates a small deck of recall cards. Non-fiction gets the core ideas. Fiction gets characters, turns, and the moments that mattered. No highlights, no note exports, no writing cards yourself. Reviews come back on a spaced schedule timed to catch each one right before you forget it. Works for paper and library books. No streaks. Two books are free.
Kern was featured in Productivity (658.2k followers), Education (79k followers) and Books (122.6k followers) on Product Hunt. Together, these topics include over 196.9k products, making this a competitive space to launch in.
Who hunted Kern?
Kern was hunted by Josip Petric. A “hunter” on Product Hunt is the community member who submits a product to the platform — uploading the images, the link, and tagging the makers behind it. Hunters typically write the first comment explaining why a product is worth attention, and their followers are notified the moment they post. Around 79% of featured launches on Product Hunt are self-hunted by their makers, but a well-known hunter still acts as a signal of quality to the rest of the community. See the full all-time top hunters leaderboard to discover who is shaping the Product Hunt ecosystem.
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Josip Petric