If you watched Duocon 2025, you knew the energy system was coming. Duolingo wanted to squeeze money out of its mostly non-paying customers and the way to do that is to make them watch more ads. It then became an issue of trying to trying to stem the exodus. They're not going back to hearts on the other mediums, but you still have hearts on the web.
In the morning, I try to do one practice lesson on the app to get the Early Bird double XP award, in case I want to use it in the evening. This award can be useful if I have a friend quest or weekend quest based on XP. I'll try to do my daily quests on the web after, which usually happens after doing five lessons. These are practicing already-completed skills. I'll also try to get in one hearts practice to see what completed skills Duolingo is suggesting I should work on. You can still do a hearts practice even if you run the table on everything that day by using the direct link. What's I like about the web: hearts and no ads.
Duolingo's response to that is to try to make the web unpalatable to users so that they won't use it & unless they have to for practical reasons. Which makes me believe they found too many issues in trying to put ads on the web, so it's not yet in their plans. I think it's hard to stay in a league if you're only in the web and it's even harder if you split your time like I do, which makes the noncompetitive leagues part of Schools so valuable.
Sometimes I'll complete the three daily quests in the morning then use the double XP timer I get for achieving daily quests to do beat the clock lessons. Despite preliminary reports to the contrary, you don't lose any energy by doing beat the clock lessons. I like doing a few of those a day. I also like to do some radio lessons, but there is a bug where the lesson complete screen says you get thirty but you only get 15 XP for them. With an XP based quest, it means I'll opt for more beat the clock lessons under the timer.
There's little place for free accounts in Leagues. The last time I was public for a full week, I was in a league with over 20 paid accts and less than ten free accts. But there were more free acts in the demotion zone than paid accts at the end. Of course the game is rigged, and leagues aren't really fun if you have to nerf XP to stay in them, and you feel you have no chance of winning them.
The workaround for that is Duo for schools, which used to be add-free, but that was removed a long time ago. Schools still allows for you to be in cooperative games like Friend Steak, Friends Quest, and Weekend Quests. Being private sounds too much like being a hermit. They ought to have noncompetitive accts, but without those, schools is the way to go. Duolingo really should make noncompetitive leagues available to everyone - they can easily do it since it's already available in Duo for schools. But I said this to them five years ago and that idea went about as far as a dollar goes at McDonald's.
Energy comes into play for me more in the evening when I do new lessons and legendaries. Some of those legendary personalized practice lessons can be really difficult to complete without running out of energy, because you also lose energy by taking too much time to answer. The fact is I need time to write out sentence when doing legendaries in the B1 & B2 part of the course. You also have to watch a bunch of ads after completing any legendary lessons. First I have to watch an ad for finishing lesson then I have to watch more because most of my energy is depleted after one legendary lesson. You lose two energies for each answer submitted under legendaries.
I find the web unpalatable for new lessons and legendaries because I'll often get time interrupts where I have to start over, and that's even worse if you're paying gems to do legendaries. Anyway why pay gems when I don't have to on the app ?
They've added a new twist where you can get five free energy points every four hours; it's not nearly enough, but they're just trying to stem the exodus. They're not going back to hearts. People will use Duolingo if it's free even if they have to watch some ads. Duolingo is trying to find out what that breaking point is.
I guess I average about fifteen lessons a day, which is still pretty active. Nearly every day I do at least ten. There's this message on the news feed that so and so did ten lessons a day, but all that means is they usually don't do ten lessons in a day & then they did. I avoid that message by doing ten a day. You're allowed a mulligan if you don't reach ten one day but I've been never tried two days in a row of not doing ten.
Throughout the seven years of my streak I've been in the top .1% of users (which is XP based) even though I don't care too much about XP. I can usually follow the Météo à la carte vidéo I like to watch, and that's progress. I can also follow the lessons French School TV gives online. I've made a free Duolingo acct work for me so far, even with the energy system.
It sounds like I do a lot of practice lessons and I do, but the reason is simple. Back in 2018 you had to do over seventy lessons to complete a unit, and now it's, what, fifteen to twenty ? That difference has to be made up somewhere.
/ using 
/ learning 
/ once learnt 
/ trying to understand at least a bit 
) and I wondered why the heck watching ads was filling up my energy instead of my gems and what the heck is this energy thing. That's pretty much when I became aware that energy had replaced gems. Only when your energy gets back up to a certain level do your gems start to be refilled.
Upper-B2 (BritishCouncil) | 
L25 (Duo) / A2 (6+y, McGraw-Hill) - Learning (Busuu): 
(interm.)