Analyze This Chess

I downloaded this app and it had some problems on my iPad Pro initially. I emailed the developers and they were great at communicating with me to try to fix the problem. Within a few days, everything was not only fixed but improved upon. I have never been more impressed with the communication from app developers before. I was trying to find an app to be able to analyize my own games and create my own database for my iPad (which is a lot more rare than one might think). Upon emailing other apps, they only had things to say such as, "maybe we will include that in the future". The analyze this developers were emailing me back and forth multiple times a day to try and fix the app. They actually care about the quality of their product. The app is not the prettiest app in the world, but it works. Hopefully they will continue on the path of hard work that I have seen to further improve the app and create more features. Definitely a necessity for serious chess players with an ipad.

I have spent countless hours holding my chess book in one hand and playing through the variations on “Analyze This” with my other while relaxing on my couch. I feel like this is possibly the most efficient form of chess study that is possible, especially when working through a chess book. Additionally, Asim and his team have been very prompt responding to emails and even released an update today to address my specific issues. Their customer service is very “old school” in a good way... Asim certainly strikes me as a “principles over money” kind of guy who loves and believes in his products. 1498 to 1822 USCF while using this app in 2017... can’t wait to see what 2018 brings! :)

I used to love the app, but ever since some update a few months ago, the app now has become virtually unusable because the analysis engine crashes ALL the time. If I move the pieces very slowly, I sometimes manage to move 10 times in a row. Once the engine crashes, the only way I've found to start it again is to close and reopen the app, which is obviously a huge pain when it crashes every ~5 moves, sometimes less. I have an ipad 3 running the last ios version that supports it (9.3.5). Since apple are such sweeties that make it impossible for you to downgrade to an earlier version of an app, I can't test to see if that would fix it. To the developers of this otherwise great app, please see if you can fix this engine crashing problem in a future version of the app. Thank you.

I think a really interesting and useful update would be an option to limit ply depth search. If i’m not mistaken, this is an easy limit to put on an engine and shouldn’t be too hard to put into an app. This would let us play against the engine with a sort of handicap on it. Forcing us to play “clean” chess. But not 20 move deep grandmaster chess. I feel that I can usually see about 5 or 6 play deep into a game, so if I could limit the engine to see that far, it would let me practice chess at my level. Let me know what you think!

I wanted a few specific things in a chess analysis app. First, I want to choose whether to enter moves for a whole game, or just set up a single position. Next, I want to look at MULTIPLE computer-generated lines, not just the single best move. Finally, I wanted to save and load games and positions easily. This is the only app which I found that does all of those things well. I agree with other reviewers who have noted that the app is not so beautiful - I hope the developer will partner with a good UI artist at some point - but functionally, this app cannot be beat.