What's new

A Best button, and the analyzer stops arguing with you

Diverging from a game is the part of the analyzer people actually use, so this release is mostly about that. There is now a Best button beside Undo: it takes back the move you just played and plays the engine's choice in its place, in one tap. The best-move arrow is back on the divergence board too, and it now disappears the moment you move rather than lingering over the position you have just left.

• Your move is no longer taken back. Playing a second move while the first was still being analysed could make the first one reappear when the analysis returned, undoing what you had done. A move now supersedes whatever the engine was working on, and that analysis is cancelled rather than left to finish.
• Divergence moves have their own depth. A single move you play yourself is something you sit and wait for, so it no longer borrows the setting meant for analysing a whole game — which could mean ten seconds for one move. Settings has a separate control for it, on the device and in the cloud.
• Captured pieces everywhere. The material taken by each side is shown above and below the board on the front page as well, so free play, an imported position and a scanned one all show the balance. They are drawn with the board's own pieces now; the previous symbols came from the system font, which drew the black set noticeably larger than the white one.
• News in the app. When there is something worth telling you, it appears as a line on the front page that you can dismiss. It stays dismissed.
• Tidier analysis screen. The title and the back arrow sit on the same line again.

Scanning a board from the other side

A position scanned from Black's point of view was read as though White were at the bottom, which put every piece on the wrong square and made the engine analyse a different position entirely — recommending, in one report, a pawn capture that was not available. Flip board on the checking screen now turns the coordinates round rather than just the view: the pieces stay where they are and the bottom right corner becomes a8. The position keeps that orientation when it loads, so the board looks like the picture you scanned.

Share a game straight into the analyzer

Chess Analyzer now appears in Android's share sheet, so a game you are looking at somewhere else can be handed over directly instead of copied and pasted. Share a PGN and the import screen opens with it in place; share a FEN and it is recognised as a position, side to move included; share a screenshot of a board and it goes straight into scanning. It works whether the app is already open or not, and nothing loads by itself — shared text waits for you to tap Load, because share buttons are easy to hit by accident. There is a guide covering it.

• Openings are graded as openings. Move classification now consults a real opening book of roughly 7,800 positions rather than guessing from the evaluation. Theory is marked as book and is no longer scored on how much material it appears to concede, so a Scandinavian or a King's Gambit stops being reported as a mistake. See how moves are classified.
• A king can move into the corner again. In positions where the king's only move was to a corner square, the board refused it. That could leave a position with nothing playable at all.
• Switching back from cloud analysis works. Turning cloud analysis off and returning to on-device analysis could leave the engine unable to start, showing a loading bar that never finished.
• Analysis says what it is doing. A running analysis used to look identical to a stuck one until the first move was scored. It now shows that it has started, and gives up with a message instead of waiting forever if the server cannot be reached.
• More room for the board. The strip carrying the players' names is half the height it was.

Analysis can run on a server now

The engine has always run on your own phone, and that puts a hard ceiling on it. A phone analysing eighty positions has to be quick about each one, and quick means shallow. Giving Stockfish four cores and a couple of seconds per move instead of a fraction of one changes what it finds — not marginally, but the difference between spotting a tactic three moves out and spotting it seven.

So there is now a second option: Cloud analysis, which sends the positions to a server that does the work and sends the evaluations back. It is off by default, it asks before it is used for the first time, and it currently appears only for accounts it has been switched on for. If you are not one of them, nothing about this release looks different, and the on-device engine is exactly as it was.

What goes over the wire is the list of board positions and the strength you picked — not the PGN file, so player names, dates, results and any comments in the game stay where they are. The positions are not kept once the analysis finishes. The privacy policy sets out the whole of it.

If the server cannot be reached, the phone quietly finishes the job itself and tells you it did. An analysis does not fail because a machine somewhere was busy.

Also in this release

• Deleting your account clears more. Cloud analysis keeps a record of how much engine time an account used. Deleting your account now removes that too, rather than leaving it behind.
• Privacy policy and terms rewritten. Both used to say that analysis never left your device. That is still the default, but it is no longer the whole story, and the pages now say so.

The opening you are in stays on screen

Analysis screens are mostly a long list of moves, and on a phone that list is the thing you spend your time scrolling. The opening name used to scroll with it — visible for a second at the top, then gone for the rest of the game. That is backwards: the opening is context for whichever move you are currently looking at, not a heading you read once and forget.

It now holds its position while the moves scroll underneath.

The match metadata — event name, date, result — is gone from that panel. It was three lines competing with the moves for the small amount of vertical space a phone has, while telling you things you either already knew or could see elsewhere: the players are still in the title bar, and the result still appears after the final move.

Also in this release

• Opening names in free play. Playing your own moves from the starting position now names the opening as you go, and keeps the last line you were in once you leave known theory.
• A way back to these pages. The browser version has a globe button in the title bar that returns you here, to the guides.

Both changes are in the browser version now, and reach the Android app with the next release.