The first version was essentially focused on the game. Because, well, the first thing we want when we go to lichess is to play chess! The feature set was small but it was enough to find a game and play.

Lichess is not just a game, though. It's much more, and it's above all a community of players. What was indeed lacking in the first version was the social side. Now it's here!

Online friends, user profile, players

Just like on the website, you can know at any moment who is online among your friends, with a header icon for quick access.

As you can see, from the friends modal you can access a profile screen. Here you can see the user's bio, ratings, list of games, etc. There is almost everything you can actually find on desktop! From the game you can also touch the username and access your opponent profile. It's a good thing to finally be able to know who you're fighting against ;)

Two other new screens are related to players: the leaderboard, like in the website and the players page. In the latter you will find suggestions of players and a search engine to find your friends by name.

Size change on android

Those who already updated the app may have noticed: the APK is significantly larger now. Believe me, this is for good reasons. I'm using a new technology which allow to embed the last version of Chrome inside the application. There are multiple advantages in doing this and they far outweigh the size drawbacks:

Android versions prior to 4.4 now have the same experience as on Lollipop

minimum Android version is now 4.0

all Android devices share the same runtime: it means predictability, less bugs, easier to fix

increased performance as Chrome continues to evolve

Tablet users are not left behind

Here a picture is worth a thousand words...

And more...

A lot of other minor improvements have landed in this version. I won't enumerate them all, but a few:

offline AI now detects draw, and nasty replay bugs should be gone

buttons now have a long press handler: try to rewind a game to the beginning with a long press!

not only tablets have a landscape mode: try it in your phone too!

as with every version: a bunch of bugs from previous versions have been fixed.

The future

So what's next?

Version 2.1 is planned soon with two requested features: move confirmation and PGN sharing of online games.

Performance

Android users should see a noticeable performance improvement in this release. I will constantly try to improve performance since to me it's essential to the game.

Puzzles

The next big feature will be the training mode. It's a long wanted feature, and with good reason. It makes sense to have it offline on mobile, so I guess it will be offline and online.

Contributing?

As you can guess there is a lot of work to do if we hope to reach the website in terms of features (even though it is not necessarily what we want).

If you are a good JavaScript developer and want to contribute to some parts of the application you are welcome :) You can contact me on lichess or IRC, where I'm veloce.

Install lichess mobile app v2: //lichess.org/mobile

Source code: https://github.com/veloce/lichobile