Great app until it crashes – Othello - The Official Game Review

I love the freedom this app provides to play Othello/Reversi with people of many skill levels from around the world. When it works well, this app has been a true favorite. For those who want a more restrictive format that matches you with players according to your skill level, there are several alternatives for that, and I have enjoyed them as well, but this remains one of my favorites for a quick game where the challenge level remains a mystery until the game is underway. That said, the increasing frequency of sudden crashes has become alarmingly high, running at about one quarter of matches. Rebooting my device has had no impact. The app will suddenly go to a black screen that briefly holds for a second or so before reverting to the iOS background. The app sometimes remains visible as though running in the background, but resuming the app then appears to restart it. On other occasions, the app seems to freeze, usually just as a match is started with the table showing, but before the initial tiles are placed and the players are identified. The tile counts both reflect -1 at this point, with basically a blank green table otherwise, a situation I do not recall encountering prior to the latest update a few months ago. This could have occurred before that, but since the freezes are more recent, I may simply not have noticed. The freezes affect the game board buttons (Menu and New game), retaining the “click” sound for each button press, but without response otherwise. The remedy is to close and restart the app, or wait briefly for the app to collapse, usually in under a minute. As Wilmamae reported on July 13, I have also experienced situations where the app improperly makes a move not taken, or otherwise incorrectly reflects the true state of the game by showing tiles reversed that could not have been by the moves made, or prevents valid moves based on the state of tiles presented as though the rules were being enforced improperly, or on a board setup other than the one displayed. These situations have been rare, perhaps affecting 2% or less of games played. The high crash rate is of much greater concern. I have considered removing and re-installing the app to see if that might help, but unfortunately, I changed the default random password to something I no longer remember, and do not want to lose my account history. Even though it no longer reflects my true match statistics because most crashes count as losses, the history still has my players list and other preferred settings. So I am stuck between loving this app, and hating its imperfections. Were it not for that, I could heartily recommend this app with a 5-star recommendation.
Review by Sevenseeker on Othello - The Official Game.