TalkChess.com

By sheer poor luck my power connector on my Huawei tablet stopped charging my tablet (motherboard issues) and I purchased a brand new Android 10 tablet (4 cores 32G) I fugured it could be a blessing in disguise as I could run some of the newer arm 8 engines in Chess for android and clear up some of the backlog in testing the numerous android engines that have appeared over time. Luckily I was able to back up my files before the old tablet went down for the count and over the years I had saved most/all of the old android apk's (some of which are getting hard to find) Now from the beginning I always preferred to download my apks and load them myself rather than keep going to the "Google Play" store so when my new tablet arrived I installed most of my original stuff and loaded some new things as I had quite a bit of 'new space' . Right away when I opened up Chess For android I noticed that the "add engines from sd card" section was greyed out" I knew that was going to be a big big problem because I had about 500-600 chess engines sitting in my extra sd card.. some of which I was looking to load into chess for android...now before my old tablet went out I had been having some issues with loading only LC0 engines (newest ones) (v23-26.0) and noticed a fancy new 'LC0 apk' that had appeared on various sites...but since I already had 3-4 versions of LC0 loaded on my old Huawei tablet I paid little attention to that development. Then sitting with my brand new shiny tablet it hit me.."People are having problems loading any Chess engines into any GUI, blocked by Android security"...Wow what a development...I was able to use a older version of Chess for android and currently have a number of engines loaded..but this issue is still a BIG PROBLEM on many levels...Android 10 also blocks programs that open into any web browser..Now sometimes when I was running a Chess for android tourney and wanted a different look for analyzing games I would use Chessbase..Droidfish or Scid and rarely Acid Ape Chess (beta) I think my Acid Ape beta version would let you load a few engines and play engine vs engine matches (2-5 minutes) I liked looking at the engine arrows while the engines contemplated their moves..(nice feature) Circle back to the present day 2021..Acid Ape Chess has only 3 chess engines now Cheng4, Scorpio NN and Arasan 22.1 and it does not play engine matches and has only one chessboard color...every time you click on the icon for this or that it offers a screen link to "Acid Ape GM Edition" (payment required)...Folks are we going forward or backwards with all this technology? Looks to me like we are going in the wrong direction....Let us know your thoughts..Thx AR