Review Insights · App Store
SmallFish Chess for Stockfish
Ted Wong · 4,391 ratings · ★ 4.8
4.8
★★★★★
4,391 ratings
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Top complaints - extracted from 9 negative reviews
Recurring phrases mined from 1-2★ reviews. The bigger the percentage, the more users have the same problem. Fix the top 2-3 in your version and you have product-market fit on day one.
1
"chess"
4 negative reviews mention this · 44% of all complaints
★★★★★ "No Full Screen Mode. Can’t find an easy way to make the chess board full screen." - vidsquid666
2
"game"
4 negative reviews mention this · 44% of all complaints
★★★★★ "Performance doesn’t seem to be optimized. I expected it to be much faster than the Stockfish engine in chess com or lichess since it’s presumably using compiled binaries rather than JavaScript. Unfortunately it’s quite often slower. It appears to recalculate every position tbh. It…" - jabberwocky17
3
"something"
3 negative reviews mention this · 33% of all complaints
★★★★★ "Performance doesn’t seem to be optimized. I expected it to be much faster than the Stockfish engine in chess com or lichess since it’s presumably using compiled binaries rather than JavaScript. Unfortunately it’s quite often slower. It appears to recalculate every position tbh. It…" - jabberwocky17
4
"move"
3 negative reviews mention this · 33% of all complaints
★★★★★ "Opening book. The opening book seems to have an error I play the Jobava London system, which is d4,Nc3,and third move Bf4 and the opening book says that it is the versov opening but it not the versov opening is third move Bg5 not Bf4 please correct it th…" - Grandmastersilk
📋 All 9 negative reviews
Every 1-2★ review we fetched. Use the copy button to grab them all for your own analysis (paste into ChatGPT/Claude with a prompt like "summarize core user problems, group by theme, ignore bugs, focus on missing features").
No Full Screen Mode
Can’t find an easy way to make the chess board full screen.
totally unintuitive
Maybe this is a good app, people seem to like it.
However, its functionality is completely obscured by a hideous, unintuitive interface.
Spend your $4.99 on a milkshake.
However, its functionality is completely obscured by a hideous, unintuitive interface.
Spend your $4.99 on a milkshake.
Droid fish is waaaaaay better
This version is trash. Droid fish is superior in every way especially settings. Why would the game randomly end in the middle? That makes no sense. I'm going to use my old phone for droid fish no thanks iphone your inferior
Opening book
The opening book seems to have an error I play the Jobava London system, which is d4,Nc3,and third move Bf4 and the opening book says that it is the versov opening but it not the versov opening is third move Bg5 not Bf4 please correct it thank you in advance
bro
stop asking me to write reviews i got this for one game
I will just use Stockfish
I don’t know what the advantages of this app are over stock fish. it says in the description review your game with comments. That’s leading me to believe that it annotate’s my game…. it does not. Yes you can analyze your game with comments if you leave those comments. So it lets you write your own comments in a game. Next I load one of the grandmaster games. The game shows annotations but soon as you make the move the annotations disappear. If I’m doing something wrong, please explain it to me and I will change my review. Which brings up another point. The app is not user-friendly at all.
Performance doesn’t seem to be optimized
I expected it to be much faster than the Stockfish engine in chess com or lichess since it’s presumably using compiled binaries rather than JavaScript. Unfortunately it’s quite often slower. It appears to recalculate every position tbh.
It can be faster to get to a high depth (30+) but it’s inconsistent. Perhaps something to do with how the hash table or threading works with iPhone (13 pro max) memory/cpu management.
Also if you try to evaluate a variation while analyzing a past game it overwrites everything in the game. 😠
It can be faster to get to a high depth (30+) but it’s inconsistent. Perhaps something to do with how the hash table or threading works with iPhone (13 pro max) memory/cpu management.
Also if you try to evaluate a variation while analyzing a past game it overwrites everything in the game. 😠
So buggy
I love apps that help the chess community, but this one needs work. The UI/UX is so hard to figure out and then it freezes randomly. I kept it on my iPad for months because I wanted to give the creator support, but I’m so done with this app. I still want to encourage the creator! I know you can do better!
It’s great, but there are big issues
Because (I assume) the depth of SmallFish goes 30+ the bot can take 2+ minutes to make a move, and I just need a max depth of 20-22, these long waits make me use the app very little, something I was wishing would be fixed when I switched from chess.com
Sentiment summary
95%
Positive (4-5★)
2%
Neutral (3★)
3%
Negative (1-2★)