Android vs iPhone for chess

I am not Apple fan, got iPhone at work (although asked for Samsung).  I can only testify that 95% of my training (tactics, endgames) has switched from PC to iPhone. And I will definitely stay with iPhone as long as I can just because of tChess Pro.

Don't have a choice in South Africa. Chess.com app isn't even available in the SA store which is extremely frustrating as in would love to use it on my IPad. I need to get a new phone soon but it will be android simply because it will offer better chess apps in SA

I will also probably only subscribe to ICC for chess as I can only really play on my PC anyway. If chess.com app was available in SA store it might be different.

I've never used the engine on Chess-wise Pro. I doubt that it is as strong as Shredder, Stockfish, or Hiarcs all of which I use regularly. It is an old engine: Tjes, developed in 1996. The app's author makes no claims relative to strength of the engine. If it was close to Shredder or the others in strength, I would expect him to do so.

I do use Chess-wise Pro for quick access to six-piece tablebases.

Can't speak to the Android, as I have an I-pad. But the I-pad apps often leave much to be desired. Stockfish for example. The last "update" has made it very buggy. Start out playing and every so often a piece will go missing from the board. Like the King.... one second it's there, the next you're wondering what just happened. :) I do like the Chess.com app though. No problems so far...

Stockfish seems to be having trouble with iOS 7. On my phone, I've had three updates in two days.

LOL

Chess genius is the best and Droidfish and chessbase online are the best.

My advice would be to make your choice based on something other than chess.  

That said, HIARCS is available for iOS, as well as Shredder, and these two apps are both beautiful and wickedly strong.  I say get both!  :)

HIARCS is still not available for Android.  Plenty of free Android chess apps but many are just dreck.  Stockfish apps abound for both platforms.

I'm also a big fan of multi-pv. SmallChess also supports multi-pv and it has a stronger engine than chess pro.

right now on my computer next to this thread there's an ad for Samsung. How irnoic.

Seriosuly. Android has more free apps but they suffer from poor quality. I'm not kidding, the top 10 Android apps don't even support piece dragging! For example, Chess for Android can be used for various engines, great. But what if I want to drag a piece? One would expect this little simple mechanism ... It's like you can't use a mouse to drag a piece on your PC. Think carefully if you wanna get an Android and if you care about chess.

The iOS chess market is huge. You have more choices and variety. You can choose the older apps such as t-Chess, Chess Pro, Stockfish etc. Or some newer but highly promising apps such as SmallChess and SmallFish. I personally use all of them - I buy every single iOS app I can afford.

A 64 bit CPU is really pretty useless unless you're using more than 4 GB RAM, which the iPhone doesn't come near to using.

Even apps written for it won't be a bit faster or better in any respect. It's pretty much just a hype.

Having gotten that out of the way, I use Android- a Nexus 4-  and I use Chess.com (not for playing against the phone, though), have used Mobilia and am now using Shredder. I'm liking Shredder the best so far.

All three apps I mentioned above support dragging pieces, a feature which I must say I fail to understand the importance of, but hey. :)

Yes and No. The 64 bits on the A7 chip doesn't benefit 99% of the applications. That's something I admit it. However, chess belongs to the 1% category!

In any modern chess engine, you'll need to store a chess position as a 64 bits integer. Accessing the 64 bits integers is a fundemental tasks in a chess engine. It needs to be read, written and manipulated for many many times in a search. The 32 bits architecture works for the 64 bits integers but it needs two CPU instructions to fetch a 64 bit data. Imagine if you had two boxes you want to carry. You can use one hand - pick the first box, drop it then pick the other box. Or you use both hands, pick both boxes at the same time. Both works, but which one is faster?

It's been proved without doubt that Android is falling critically behind in chess app development.

Look at the benchmark score here:

http://talkchess.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=43212&start=250

Scroll down until you see a table of benchmark scores. For the moment, we don't know how well the Notes 3 performs but iPhone 5s beats Notes 2 by an enoromous margin. The difference is like a 2800 Elo Carlsen against a 1800 Elo club player.

You don't need to access more than 4GB ram to take advantage of the 64 bits CPU. Of course the more RAM the better it is, for a chess app, more RAM tranlates to bigger hash table. The problem is that the benefits from hash table is not linearly dependent on the performance of the engine. Too small will significantly degrade the engine, but after more than a certain threshold, you don't see much gain from a even bigger hash table. That's because most of the overhead is done in the search tree prunching etc.

Unless Android can offer a 64 bits architecture, it's always an inferior platform for chess. You can't deny that, it has slower performance and lower app quality.

Re iOS & Android on tablets.

My wife has an iPad mini. I recently upgraded my Nook color to an Android 4.2.2 tablet. I've used both.

In general iOS applications are better than similar Android ones. My favorite PC app is Shredder, but Shredder for Android is fair to poor. The tactics mode is good but it will not read and replay an imported file of games. I emailed Stefan Meyer-Kahlen and he replied they're working on it. Hiarcs is not available for Android.

Of course iOS had a head start on Android. Whether Android apps will improve in quality & number is anyone's guess.

You guys not telling the whole things. Please tell so that I can help you.

I've got about 20 different apps on my android phone, and every one of them works just fine. Chessbase, chess.com, chess book study and perfect chess trainer are the ones I use most, along with a bunch of tactic apps...no issues at all.

Disclaimer:

I currently have had Note 2 for a year and I'm more than happy. I haven't tried iPhone yet. DroidFish is all what you need - its just too good.

64 bits in iPhone 5S is really a hype. Android - Apple war is long over, with Android being the victor. (Out in the global market) As said earlier, you really need atleast 4 GB RAM for it to take any effect. I wouldn't be surprised if Samsung comes up with 64 bit with 4 GB RAM with Quadcore/Octacore soon. (Note3 currently has 3GB)

I'm really surprised that nobody mentioned S4 has a whooping 4 Cores! (4 + 4 but I believe it will use only 4) iPhones lack # of cores and RAM - and plus, S4 has a faster clock rate - so all in one, it will search much faster, and much more positions, which is what you want.

So hardware-wise S4 wins hands down, imo.

It would be great if somebody posted some results about the two, NOT the speed comparisons of S4 and iPhone, (as its NOT related to chess in any way) but something related to chess. (Nobody really cares about their responsive to touch - its all of OS. Android is obviously slower as its in Java. Anyhow, they're all fast these days and you can't really make much difference.)

Both phones are, great. Both have same engine, Stockfish DD. You won't lose out in any way if you buy either one. Its just a matter of personal taste :-)

PS) I'd be willing to play Android - iPhone 12 match series with my Note 2 if you want. It'll be interesting :-)

choose the largest screen for chess!!!

I use my Samsung Galaxy Note 1 everyday.