Conjuguer: A Deep French Verb Practice App for iOS

French verb practice usually falls apart at the point where a dictionary stops being a study tool. Conjuguer takes the opposite approach: it puts a large, searchable verb collection beside the tables, explanations and repetition loops needed to make those forms stick. The result feels less like a flash-card toy and more like a compact reference book that happens to quiz you.

The project is also unusually inspectable. The public repository contains the SwiftUI app, its model and corpus data, tests, widgets, documentation and the scripts used to build frequency rankings. It targets iOS 26 and Swift 6, and adds an on-device Foundation Models tutor for devices that support Apple Intelligence. Here is what is useful, what is optional, and what the license actually covers.

What It Does

The centre of Conjuguer is its verb browser: 6,326 distinct French verbs, searchable and sortable alphabetically or by frequency, presented as a list or grid. Every verb carries a frequency rank rather than leaving the long tail as an unstructured remainder, so you can browse from être and avoir into the less common vocabulary without changing tools.

Open a verb and the app lays out its French tenses, with irregular stems and endings picked out in red so the shape of the exception is visible at a glance. Many entries add an etymology and an example sentence drawn from French literature. A separate Models tab groups verbs by the conjugation patterns they inherit and ranks those models by irregularity, which is a more useful mental model than memorising every verb as an isolated exception.

The reference side continues with explanations of when each tense is used and how it is formed. The practice side offers two quiz difficulties, partial credit for a correct skeleton with a dropped accent, a Live Activity and Game Center leaderboards. Home Screen and Lock Screen widgets surface a verb of the day or a daily quiz, and two Control Center actions open a random verb or start the quiz without first navigating through the app.

How to Install It

If you only want to use Conjuguer, install the free App Store version from the official listing. Building from source is optional and is useful only if you want to inspect the implementation, run the tests or make a change; that route requires iOS 26 and Swift 6.

# Open the free App Store listing:
open https://apps.apple.com/us/app/conjuguer/id1588624373

If you choose the source route, the copied Secrets.xcconfig supplies the TelemetryDeck application ID and is intentionally gitignored. The README says the placeholder can be left in place: the app still builds and runs, but analytics go nowhere. The repository also includes a SwiftLint pre-commit hook that you can enable per clone; it is a contributor convenience, not a runtime dependency.

How to Use It

Start in Verbs and search for something you actually meet in a text. The frequency sort is useful when you want the common core first; alphabetical sort is better when a teacher, book or quiz has already given you the infinitive. Each row shows the French form, an English gloss and the frequency badge, making it easy to move from recognition to a complete conjugation table.

When a table feels opaque, move sideways rather than drilling the same answer. Models explains the pattern behind a verb, Info explains the tense, and Quiz turns the next recall attempt into a timed exercise. The tutor is a separate path: on a device with Apple Intelligence, it can answer questions about French verbs and tenses on-device and remember the conversation between visits.

Verbs → search for a verb → open its table → compare tenses
Models → inspect the inherited pattern → notice the irregularity
Quiz → choose a difficulty → type the form → review the result
Info → ask the tutor on a supported Apple Intelligence device

The small extensions make the practice loop easier to keep. A Verb of the Day widget can show the present-tense forms on the Home Screen or Lock Screen, a quiz widget offers an interactive prompt, and the Control Center actions provide a fast entry point. The arcade minigame and alternate Arc, rooster, croissant and beret icons are optional personality rather than distractions from the core reference.

Verb of the Day widget → see a daily verb and its présent forms
Quiz widget → answer a daily question from the Home or Lock Screen
Quick Quiz control → launch a quiz from Control Center
Live Activity → follow an in-progress quiz on the Lock Screen and Dynamic Island

The Screenshots

The repository screenshots show the intended rhythm clearly: a dark, high-contrast verb list; a complete verb screen; model and tense reference views; a typed quiz answer; quiz results; settings; and the small arcade game. They are product screenshots rather than decorative mockups, so the important detail is the amount of information the app keeps visible without turning the study surface into a web page.

How It Works Under the Hood

Conjuguer is SwiftUI throughout apart from a small UIKit shim that hosts Game Center authentication. The repository separates the verb parser, conjugation engine, models, tense descriptions, quiz state and example data into inspectable Swift and XML/JSON files. That structure matters: the app can explain a form from the same model data it uses to generate a quiz rather than maintaining a second, hand-written answer table.

The ranking data is prepared ahead of time from documented French lexical sources, with the resulting counts compiled into the app instead of looked up from a server. The tutor is a different boundary: Foundation Models runs it on-device when Apple Intelligence is available, and the app explains when the capability is unavailable. Widgets use a shared app-group snapshot and deeplinks, while Live Activity and Game Center stay focused on the quiz state.

The Repository and Its Releases

This is a real source repository, not a repackaged binary. Alongside the Xcode project are the app and widget targets, model and corpus files, tests, screenshots, release notes, frequency-generation scripts, privacy material and project-structure documentation. The README also points to the App Store listing for people who only want to use the finished app.

The data trail is more detailed than most small learning apps. The README identifies GLÀFF and Lexique as sources for frequency work, explains the earlier Sketch Engine rankings, and keeps the provenance of derived counts visible. That does not make every source interchangeable, but it gives a contributor enough context to understand which part is application code, which part is derived data and which part needs attribution.

What You Can Verify Before Installing

A sensible source-build checklist is short. Confirm that your device and SDK meet iOS 26, open Conjuguer.xcodeproj in Xcode, create Secrets.xcconfig from the checked-in example, and build the Conjuguer scheme. If you leave the TelemetryDeck placeholder untouched, the build should still run; if you want to contribute regularly, enable the repository's SwiftLint hook and inspect the test target as well.

Where It Falls Short

The first limitation is platform age. iOS 26 is a hard target in the current project, so an older iPhone or iPad cannot use this checkout simply because the app is written in SwiftUI. This is a project built for the current Apple platform cycle, not a compatibility layer for older devices.

The second limitation is language scope. The interface is localized in English and French, and VoiceOver switches pronunciation between those two languages so French forms are not read as English. That is thoughtful bilingual support, but it is not a multilingual classroom: learners who need Chinese, German or another bridge language will need to bring their own explanation layer.

Finally, the AI tutor is conditional. It requires a device that supports Apple Intelligence, and no amount of rebuilding the project turns that capability on in unsupported hardware. The core browser, tables and quiz remain the reason to use Conjuguer; the tutor is a useful bonus when the operating system makes it available.

The Licence: What You Can Do

The application code is licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 3. That makes the repository genuinely reusable for study and modification, but redistribution of covered modifications comes with GPL obligations. A public source tree is not a promise that every bundled asset has identical terms, so read the notices before shipping a fork.

The verb-frequency data and the corpora behind examples and rankings have their own attribution and share-alike details, documented in the README and the repository's source notes. In practice, treat the Swift code, derived XML data, literature examples, fonts, sounds and other assets as separate license surfaces. Conjuguer does the useful work of naming those sources; a downstream distributor still needs to preserve the notices that apply to the material they carry forward.

Should You Build or Install It

If you want a serious French conjugation reference that can also turn lookup into practice, Conjuguer is a strong small-project pick. It has enough data to reward long-term use, enough explanation to show why a form looks the way it does, and enough SwiftUI surface area to make the source interesting to Apple-platform developers. Install it from the App Store for the shortest path; clone it if you want to inspect the engine, contribute to the corpus or learn from a focused iOS 26 codebase.

# Open the free App Store listing:
open https://apps.apple.com/us/app/conjuguer/id1588624373