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I can't believe it, but Chess for Android just passed its ten year anniversary! In November 2008, it appears for the first time on the -then-called- Android Market, together with Reversi for Android. Checkers for Android was soon to follow. The Android Market was later renamed Google Play.

Working on this GUI has been a lot of fun, even though it took all spare time away from further developing my chess engine BikJump. But pioneering support for third party engines (at a time nobody was compiling for ARM), both UCI and XBoard, accessing endgame tablebases on SD card, adding PGN and setup features, simplifying engine setup through Chessbase compatible format and the Android Open Exchange format, using OCR apps to read chess positions, translating text to other languages, maintaining an online manual, and recently adding support for Certabo, DGT, and Millennium electronic chessboards has been just as rewarding. I have compiled many engines for Android back in the days, ran full tournaments, and overall tried to improve the ecosystem for chess on the Android platform. Now, ten years later, we have many excellent chess apps on Google Play, each with their own loyal fan base.

Below you will see all the devices I have used over the years to test my apps. Even today, all apps still run just fine on the Android Dev Phone 1 with Android 1.6 (api 4).

A merry Christmas to all my chess friends out there!

A merry Christmas to you too, Aart. Thank you for all the hard work that you've put into Chess for Android.

Thank you for making your gui THE tool to test android chess engines.
Merry Christmas!!

Thank you both for your kind words!

Hi Aart

A big thank you from me too!

Not only for providing such a great app over the years but also for supporting the Italian Certabo electronic chess board and of course,
Berger's excellent DIY board Solus Chess.

Here's to the next ten years

Regards
Bryan

Hi Aart,

I also want to thank you. Now YOUR app is the only one that supports all these boards!!
I am looking forward to use your app and play with humans on the FICS server.
Chess for Android will be the Nr. 1 for the next years.

Thanks Aart!

Greetings from Austria

Peter

Thanks Bryan and Peter too for the very kind words.
And a happy, chess-filled 2019 for all forum readers!

Hi Aart,

at the moment I can play with an engine with a fixed time - e.g. 15 minutes - each side.
Is it possible to make a „Human Bonus“? So the engine has 15 minutes - the human player has 15 minute + the bonus time (for example +30 minutes).

Peter