Introducing SuperCards: Give Your Phone Something Better to Do

You picked up your phone to check the weather. Twenty minutes later you put it down having watched a stranger restore a cast-iron pan, and you still don’t know whether it’s going to rain.

Nobody decides to spend their attention that way. It gets taken a few seconds at a time, by apps that very capable people built to do exactly that. We don’t think the answer is to throw the phone in a lake. It’s the most powerful tool most of us will ever own, and it’s already in your pocket. The better question is what else it could do with those same few minutes.

SuperCards is our answer: a free app for making notecards on your Mac and reviewing them on your iPhone. It exists to help you use your phone to focus your attention instead of fragmenting it, and it rests on a belief we’ve held onto despite considerable evidence to the contrary, which is that smartphones can make people smarter.

Why notecards

The notecard is one of the oldest learning tools there is, and nobody has improved on the basic design: two sides and not much room. The lack of room is the useful part. To fit an idea on a card you have to decide what it actually says, and that decision is most of the work of understanding it. Then the card goes in a stack, the stack goes in your pocket, and you flip through it until the idea is yours.

Most note apps are built for capture. They’re very good at it, which is how people end up with thousands of notes they never open again. SuperCards is built for the other half of the job. Keep whatever note-taking system you like. This is a note-remembering system.

More than flashcards

You can make flashcards with SuperCards, and it’s good at them: vocabulary, anatomy, equations typeset in real LaTeX. If you have an exam coming, start there.

But a card is really just a small two-sided page, and that turns out to be a useful shape for plenty of things that have nothing to do with exams:

• A developer points an AI assistant at an unfamiliar codebase and gets back a deck, with a snippet on the front of each card and a plain-English explanation on the back.
• A novelist keeps a card for each character, so a detail from chapter 3 is still true in chapter 27.
• A coach puts the formation on one side and every player’s assignment on the other, and the team studies on the bus.
• A candidate with a final-round interview on Friday writes each story as four bullets, because bullets are easier to remember than a script and sound less rehearsed.
• Someone gathers a dozen passages worth sitting with and sends the deck to a few friends.

That last one matters more than it looks. Cards are a good way to hand an idea to another person: more considered than a text message and far lighter than a slide deck. We think of them as double-sided slides that fit in a pocket. A SuperCards deck is a single file you can AirDrop, text, or email, and anyone with the iPhone app can open it and start flipping. There are many more examples on our use cases page.

How it works

Make cards on your Mac. The Card Editor gives you a freeform canvas for each side of a card. Put text, images, GIFs, syntax-highlighted code, and LaTeX math wherever you want them. Images come in by drag and drop, from the clipboard, or from a URL. When an idea turns up while you’re busy with something else, Brain Dump catches it from the menu bar so you can file it into a deck later.

You don’t have to make every card by hand, either. Give an AI assistant your lecture notes, a PDF, or a codebase, and it can write a whole deck in the SuperCards Exchange Format, a documented file format that any LLM can produce. There are official integrations for Claude and a copy-and-paste prompt for everything else. Imported decks wait in an inbox until you’ve looked them over, so nothing enters your library without your say-so. Create decks with AI has the setup.

Study on your iPhone. SuperCards Mobile does one thing, and that thing is Study Mode. Turn the phone sideways and a card fills the screen. Double-tap to flip it, and swipe left or right to move through the deck. Once you know a card cold, flick it diagonally off the screen and it leaves the session (there is confetti). Shake the phone to bring it back. Swipe down from the top to see your progress, a study timer, and the exit.

The sideways part is deliberate. It matches the shape of a paper notecard, and it leaves out everything a feed runs on. There is nothing to scroll, and the app has no streaks and sends no notifications. The phone app is for studying only; cards are made on the Mac, and they look the same on both.

Keep your data. There’s no account to create and no server to trust, because we don’t have one. Every deck is a folder and every card is a plain, readable file on your own disk. If you want your decks on your phone automatically, turn on iCloud Drive sync in Settings and they appear in the iPhone app on their own. If you’d rather skip iCloud, send a deck to your phone as a file. Either way, we never see your cards, which also means we can’t recover them for you, so back up the folder.

This is the foundation

SuperCards is young. What exists today is a foundation: an editor, a study mode, and a file format that lets them talk to each other and to other tools. It has rough edges, and it runs on less hardware than we’d like. The Mac app needs Apple Silicon and macOS 14 or later, and studying needs an iPhone.

The roadmap lists what we’re planning from here: a template manager for custom card templates, a public place to share decks with the community, an AI assistant for studying and card creation, plugins for the productivity tools you already use, and iPad and web apps. These are plans, and the order isn’t settled. The people who use the app have a lot of say in it.

That’s where you come in. SuperCards is made by a very small team, and the person who reads your email is the person who builds the fix. If something confused you, broke, or turned out to be missing, tell us at feedback@supercards.io. If you’d like to be more involved than that, say so. The Contribute page lists the ways to help, and we’re glad to hear about ones that aren’t on it.

Get SuperCards

SuperCards is free, with every feature included. There are no ads in the apps and no investors behind them.

Download SuperCards for Mac; the same page covers SuperCards Mobile for iPhone. Then make one card about something you’d like to still know a month from now, and flip through it the next time you’re about to open a feed.

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Have questions? Visit Support or the Learning Center for guides and tutorials.

Want to follow along? Every release is written up in the changelog.

First published in January 2025. Updated in October 2026.