Mixed bag – SocialChess • Online Chess Review

It must be hard to compete with the likes of chess.com and Lichess and I appreciate that this is an indie app likely made by just one person. The UI is well-thought out and I never have to wait long for a game. (I play almost all lengthy correspondence games.) The recent addition of post-game analysis is promising, but mostly it leaves me feeling frustrated and I end up taking my PGN to another chess app for analysis. My particular gripes: * The analysis doesn't seem that deep and it regularly suggests dubious moves. Why doesn’t it tell us what the depth is? Why can’t we increase the depth if wanted? After all it’s using the CPU on our phone/iPad, not some cluster in the cloud. * During analysis if I missed a move and want to explore, there’s no way to get any further analysis, ie engine moves. Clearly Stockfish or similar is now embedded into the app, so I don’t understand why I can’t use the engine to explore lines during post-game analysis. This is another reason I end up having to copy the PGN and go to another app. Additionally, the app just feels very un-iOS like. Gestures that are standard in other apps just don’t work. For example, swiping to go back to the previous screen. Instead I have to reach all the way to the top and tap the back button. And it used to be that I could swipe right on a game screen to go the strategy board, but this stopped working at some point so instead I have to use the menu which is cumbersome. I will say that the app works well on M1 Macs and find myself using it from my Mac more and more, which I love.
Review by j_w_s on SocialChess • Online Chess.