You can run Hidden Dragon on your phone right now. No download. No App Store. No waiting for approval.
Open hidden-dragon.app in your mobile browser and you get the full experience: flashcards, pronunciation trainer, stroke writing, AI stories, conversation practice, all of it. Add it to your home screen and it looks and feels like a native app.
This post explains how to do that, what you get, and why we have not shipped a native app to the stores yet.
How to add Hidden Dragon to your home screen
On iPhone (Safari)
- Open Safari and go to hidden-dragon.app
- Tap the Share button (the square with the arrow pointing up)
- Scroll down and tap Add to Home Screen
- Name it whatever you like (default is "Hidden Dragon")
- Tap Add in the top right corner
You now have a Dragon icon on your home screen. Tap it and the app opens in full screen, no browser address bar, no tab bar.
On Android (Chrome)
- Open Chrome and go to hidden-dragon.app
- Tap the three-dot menu in the top right
- Tap Add to Home screen (or Install app on some versions)
- Confirm the name and tap Add
Chrome may offer Install app directly, which gives you the full install experience with a splash screen and everything.
What you get
Once installed, Hidden Dragon sits on your home screen alongside your other apps. When you open it:
- Full screen — no browser chrome, just the app
- Fast loading — the app shell is cached on your device, so it loads instantly on repeat visits
- Offline flashcards — your SRS schedule, card data, and book progress are stored locally. Review your cards on the subway without a connection
- All features — pronunciation scoring, stroke writing, AI stories, grammar analysis, conversation practice, the works
Things that need a network connection: AI-generated content (stories, grammar analysis, conversation responses) and pronunciation scoring (which uses Azure speech services). Everything else works offline.
Why not just ship a native app?
We get this question a lot. The short answer: app store policies make it painful for small educational apps.
The 30% tax
Apple and Google take a 30% cut of in-app purchases. Our Pro tier is $12.99/month. Through the App Store, that becomes roughly $9 to us per subscriber. Over a year, that is nearly $40 per subscriber going to the platform instead of toward development.
We are not against platform fees in principle. But 30% is steep for a small team. It means either raising prices (which we do not want to do) or eating the cost (which we cannot afford at our scale).
The rules around external payments
After the Epic v. Apple ruling in May 2025, US apps can include links to external payment systems. That helps. But the rules are different in every region:
- US: External payment links allowed, near-zero Apple fee
- EU: External links allowed under the Digital Markets Act, but Apple charges a ~5% Core Technology Fee
- Rest of world: Varies. Some regions still require Apple IAP for digital goods
Managing compliance across regions adds complexity. For a small team, the engineering and legal overhead of maintaining region-specific payment flows is significant.
Review process friction
App store reviews are not just a formality. Educational apps with AI-generated content, speech recognition, and user-generated writing face extra scrutiny. A rejection means weeks of delay. For a web app, a bug fix ships in minutes.
We update Hidden Dragon multiple times per week. New features, new grammar patterns, new pronunciation models, new stories. The web lets us ship as fast as we build. App store review cycles would slow us down to a crawl.
What about a wrapper like Capacitor?
We have evaluated Capacitor — a tool that wraps a web app in a native shell. It gives you App Store distribution with 80-90% code reuse. We plan to do this eventually. But it still means dealing with the same app store policies: review cycles, payment cuts, compliance per region.
For now, the web version gives you everything a native app would, without the friction.
The bottom line
You do not need an App Store to learn Chinese. Open hidden-dragon.app on your phone, add it to your home screen, and you have everything you need.
We will ship native apps when the economics make sense. Until then, the web version is the full product, not a lite version. Same features, same data, same Dragon.
Start with What is Hidden Dragon? or jump straight to How to Learn Chinese Tones Without Going Crazy.