Stuqy is now live on iOS, Android, and web — and a few weeks after launch, it already reached its first stable 1.0 release. What most people discovering the app today don’t see is that it didn’t start as Stuqy at all. It started years earlier as Leitlearn, and it took a full rewrite — twice — to get here.
Act One: Leitlearn on CakePHP
Leitlearn began as a project for our BUT Informatique at Université Lyon 1, built with Léo Trux and Aiman Manchout on top of CakePHP. It was a proper flashcard app, deck management, dashboards, the works, but it carried all the friction of an early side project: an aging PHP framework and a UI that worked but never quite felt like something you’d want to open every day.
That codebase is now archived and public as leitlearn-legacy — kept online for anyone who wants to see where this actually started.
Act Two: A Next.js Alpha, Solo
I later rebuilt Leitlearn from scratch on my own, this time as a Next.js web app. It wasn’t a new product so much as an early alpha of what would eventually become Stuqy: cleaner decks, a simpler edit flow, a dashboard that finally looked like something worth shipping.
It proved the concept, but it was still a web-only prototype. Getting to the product I actually wanted meant a complete redesign and, this time, native mobile apps from day one.
Act Three: Stuqy Is Officially Live
On July 3, 2026, that redesign became Stuqy, live on iOS, Android, and web. The pitch stayed exactly as simple as it always should have been: make a deck, study it, come back tomorrow and do it again.
What changed was everything around that loop. Stuqy tracks a daily streak, hands out XP for every session, and unlocks badges at real milestones — not decoration bolted onto the learning, but the actual reason people come back. And it comes with a mascot: a small purple bear, also named Stuqy, that shows up on your profile, cheers a new streak record, and is quietly judging you if you let a streak freeze go to waste.
Studying itself got three modes instead of one repetitive drill: Flip Cards for classic recall, Multiple Choice for quick sessions on busy days, and Match, a timed pairing game. On top of that, Stuqy AI could already turn a photo of your notes, a PDF, or a typed-out topic into a ready-to-study deck — because the hardest part of studying is usually just getting started.
One Month In: Stuqy 1.0
Less than a month later, on August 1, 2026, Stuqy 1.0 shipped as the first stable release across all three platforms. Stuqy AI moved from a deck generator to a full built-in study assistant you can chat with directly. A custom avatar system — the Styqs — let people build a layered look and show it off on their profile, alongside a reworked badge system with clearer tiers, daily challenges, and competitive leagues that rank players against each other.
Streaks, XP, badges, and the mascot are still exactly as central as they were on day one. 1.0 isn’t a relaunch — it’s the version where the redesign finally caught up with the product we’d wanted to build since the CakePHP days.
Why This Matters to Me
Leitlearn taught me more about shipping software than any single project before it: what it’s like to inherit your own technical debt, when a rewrite is worth the cost and when it isn’t, and how much a product’s feel — not just its feature list — decides whether people actually use it. Watching it go from a CakePHP prototype to a native app on the App Store and Google Play, two rewrites and several years later, is still the project I’m proudest to point to.
If you want to see where it began, the legacy codebase is public on GitHub. If you want to see where it ended up, Stuqy is live now on iOS, Android, and web.