MARU app: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/maru-learn-japanese-hiragana/id1208009110
Why at all? I will travel to Japan very soon. My goal is simple, learn how recognize characters and sound them out. No writing. Just reading. Makes it easy to remember how to say certain things in a conversation or read signs.
It's an app for beginners more towards memorization and writing of characters and expanding your vocabulary. I like the drills as it helps with memorization/association. The reminders are very helpful of course. They are nudges to get you doing the work. How much better can it get? It pushes a romanized word (ashita) with both English spelling (tomorrow) and Hiragana (あした) spelling. The more hiragana you notice and sound out the more the momentum builds to learn more vocabulary and more symbols.
You have to approach it with the idea of character and sound. Remove the English association from your mind i.e. imagine if you did not know English. Just getting to that point where you can look at a character and sound it out is the first step just like how you would teach a baby. The words are important to learn, but not at the beginning. The better one gets the more the words become easier to associate to things.
Language is just the agreement of labeling of things in the world. The more people agree that blue is "ao" then the more aois associated with blue. You have to memorize it like memorizing all vocabulary. The more time put into memorization, the better and more interested I get. Reading Japanese in Pokemon ROMs used to be a motivation that didn't get very far since there is switching between two alphabets: Hiragana and Katakana!
$15 unlocks the app which is a steal when you think of what you are unlocking.