Chess for Android

Chess for Android is a long-running open-source chess program by Jeroen Carolus. It combines an on-device engine and study tools with two very different online services: modern Lichess integration and the Free Internet Chess Server (FICS). It is not just a wrapper around either site; the board, native engine, game database and training material are inside the APK.

Offline board and study tools

• Play against the built-in engine, use the board for two people on one device, or install a compatible engine that supports the Open Exchange Protocol.
• Save games to a local database, search by player, event, date or result, edit them, step through moves, and import, export or share standard game files.
• Explore openings through the bundled ECO data, set up a position manually, and practise a local collection of mate-in-two positions.
• TalkBack support speaks board squares, pieces, moves and controls. A separate Accessibility Drag mode is meant to be used with TalkBack off: it speaks the selected piece and square while you drag, then speaks the destination when you release.

Version 10.6.0 adds settings designed for e-ink readers: a greyscale theme, reduced animations and a no-drag tap-to-select/tap-to-move option. Its preset also turns off effects that cause ghost trails on slow-refresh panels. The release includes performance work so clocks and engine scores are redrawn only when their text changes. These are source and commit findings; we did not test the interface on an e-ink device.

What goes online

Lichess uses browser-based OAuth with PKCE and asks for board-play, puzzle, tournament and team scopes. You can see ongoing games, create or accept challenges, play supported time controls, fetch puzzles and work with supported teams and Swiss events. The access token is kept in the app’s private preferences; signing out clears its local copy but the source does not call Lichess’s token-revocation endpoint.

FICS uses a direct legacy socket to freechess.org:23. Timeseal adds move timing information but is not modern transport encryption. Local engine games do not contact either service. The experimental hotspot board normally connects two devices for a game; its separate Share mode allows observers. The host listens on an unauthenticated, unencrypted socket on port 8080, so use it only on a local network you trust and stop hosting afterwards.

About this file

• This is F-Droid’s FOSS build of version 10.6.0, compiled from the MIT-licensed source and signed with F-Droid’s key. The Google Play flavour is a different build and includes the proprietary Cast dependency that this one omits.
• The APK’s eight chess-piece sets are not all MIT. The default Alpha set is limited to personal non-commercial use; California and Staunty are CC BY-NC-SA 4.0; Companion and Leipzig are labelled only freeware; and Kosal’s required CC BY 4.0 credit is missing. The project gives no source or licence for its bundled sounds or five board textures.
• The 3.6 MB APK runs on Android 7.0 or later and contains engine libraries for 64-bit ARM, 32-bit ARM, x86 and x86_64.
• It declares seven permissions: internet and network/Wi-Fi state for online play and local sharing, wake lock, vibration, fullscreen and one app-internal receiver permission. Our scan found no tracker SDKs.
• The three retained screenshots are project images last changed for the 9.9.x interface: an engine game, a local mate-in-two problem and a FICS game. We omit the old 9.9.3 start-screen image because it shows the Play-only Cast button absent from this FOSS build.

CPU types in this build: arm64-v8a (64-bit ARM, almost every phone since 2017); armeabi-v7a (32-bit ARM, older and budget phones); x86 (32-bit Intel, emulators); x86_64 (64-bit Intel, emulators and Chromebooks).

Versions currently kept in the F-Droid repository. We host and check only the newest one.