chess24 > Play, Train, Watch 4+

Made for beginners not chess enthusiast

First blue version of app was great! Seemed to be designed by chess players for chess players. New orange version is okay but just okay. Seems to promote learning and educating new people about chess but the board and play is mah. The animation and touch feel is not needed for people to know how to play already. Old version was better.

Don’t use it for blitz or bullet on mobile

1. There’s a huge lag between move being made on server and move being shown to me. That means my time is spent on server instead of me thinking.
For me, it shows that the opponent is thinking and it’s time is counting down. Then, when the info arrives, the clocks are adjusted, the opponent suddenly gets back 2-3-4-5 or more seconds which are deducted consequently from my time. It just kills me.
2. Premoves are ignored. Can’t explain it, it shows as purple then after some time it’s deselected and it’s not happening. My educated guess is that somehow the app is notified that opponent moved but it cannot make my move because still waits for the opponent move and then is when abandons my premove.

All in all, making two taps to make a move is slow enough, but losing almost all of my time with the lag, losing the premoves means playing a blitz is an irritating torture.

I know there are other features in this app. But still, this is a mobile app, meaning a lot of people will use it to kill a few minutes with playing a few blitz games. Or to challenge a grandmaster in banter blitz. I simply won’t review how effective is learning openings on mobile…

Problems

The main issue now with this app is games being spontaneously aborted at the end. Many times I’ve been in winning positions and the game just stops and it’s oops game was aborted. Twice today my games were aborted with my opponent letting the time run out and the game is aborted. And then looking back at the game log they were awarded a win? It seems like what should be the basics of a chess app are lacking with this one. Anyways I’m going to delete this app to avoid further aggravation and come back in a few months to see if the bugs have been fixed.

Developer Response ,

Thanks for trying our new Chess app. From next week premium users can choose not to be paired against guests.
Regarding playing bullet, have you tried disable move animations on the setting menu?
I'll pass the feedback about the 10 active games limitation to the development team.
Hope you can see and feel the difference. New build is coming up next week.
Best,
Christian