Pulsar was an after college project i started based on having taking a couple of basically first year courses in C. Originally when I started it, it was a one file program in 1998 in C done in student addition of Visual Studio C/C++. From 2002-2009 and it was playing online at ICC and FICS, I interacted with a lot of variants players like crazyhouse, loser's atomic, and I taught it variants using the existing search engine. It got about 2000 -2200 in every variant, some higher or lower. After seeing guys who could obsessively play it, and I gave it a style of always grabbing space, a less sound strategy when matched with a similar ranked computer, I thought it be nice to turn this console app that can connect to a client to play online into something easier to use. Now users could download it in the 00s to play with Winboard app, but it was tedious to hook up console apps. It got a boost though in 2009 when the Winboard author(HG Muller) bundled it with Winboard for all and later if you got the variants pack. But I wanted an app particularly to make levels more accessible. So out of work in 2014 looking to get my first job in mobile ( which happened) i made three apps, and one was porting pulsar console app to an iOS app with a board and level picker. It was a small used program 2014-2018 as Pulsar Chess Variants, but end of 2018 I rebranded it Pulsar Chess Engine. And in 2019 I added an engine analysis mode to look at a players log file of games and added some game collections like classic gams in this log file view so they could go in and look at their games or Kasparov's. And I added show book moves options and show thinking. In 2020 I ported Chess960 which the engine could always play to the app. And working with users I improved level progressions. And since about 2020 with Chess Queen on Netflix, it's really taken off up to over 1500 devices a month now using it and many sessions per device on average.
It's on android too but that's a smaller affair, never could figure out how to market to android as well. its maybe 100 devices a month there.
Half the apple users are actually on the Mac Catalyst version now and other half on iOS.
Both pulsar apps are accessible with a speaking board to the blind and visually impaired with Voice Over on iOS/Mac and Talkback on Android. And the chess speakmove and tap on square piece announcements are in 5 languages English, Spanish, Italian, French and German.
And being more concerned with reaching the new generation of chess players than monetizing, i've kept it free and ad free.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pulsar-ch ... d839640447
https://play.google.com/store/apps/deta ... n_US&gl=US
