Last updated on December 14th, 2025 at 02:08 pm
Exponential Idle – Casual Game Review
Exponential Idle is a Casual/Simulation game from Gilles-Philippe Paille, first launched in 11th November 2020.
It’s rated 4+ and currently has 3,935+ ratings on the App Store.
What Makes Exponential Idle Stand Out
Play Exponential Idle, a math-inspired incremental game. Your goal is to stack up money by taking advantage of exponential growth. To do so, you have to step through time by tapping the equation or simply let the time follow its course. You can perform change of variables to accelerate the process, buy upgrades, get rewards, and unlock achievements while earning virtual money.
This Casual game offers engaging gameplay and regular updates for mobile players.
Player Feedback
As a newer release, Exponential Idle is building its player community. Early feedback suggests .
Recent Updates & Development
Latest Update: 10th March 2025
Recent improvements include:
- Two new Custom Theories: 'Magnetic Fields' and 'Basel Problem'.
- Updated the Riemann Zeta Function custom theory.
- Added a max currency label in the publication popup of Custom Theories.
- Added the τ value of the active Custom Theory on the offline calculation screen.
- Fixed: Some forms of the custom theory URL were not considered as being in the official repository.
- Fixed: Variable 'b' of the Riemann Zeta CT could not be fully bought by the auto buyer.
- Fixed: API – The 'Keyboard.NUMERIC' property was not behaving as expected for non-English OS languages.
- Fixed: API – Crash when providing invalid quaternary entries.
Download & Availability
Exponential Idle is available through the official App Store for iOS devices.
Get Exponential Idle on App Store
Requirements: Requires iPhone 5s / iPad Air / iPad Air (Cellular) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina, Cellular) / iPhone 6 / iPhone 6 Plus / iPad Air 2 / iPad Air 2 (Cellular) / iPad Mini 3 or later.
Compatible with iPhone and iPad devices.
Player Experience Highlights
Community Insight:
We dont understand the math in the slightest, but its fun, and updates are constantly coming out to fix bugs and add gameplay :).
Absolutely genius. Ive not had more fun in a mobile game, figuring out the puzzles to make the function grow. Please expand this game with more content.
This game lets the player actually dive deep into it without being bombarded by ads, given an impossible progression system requiring payment. We feel like Im back in 2009, when mobile games were build with love and actually designed to entertain, not just make the developer money. This is easily in our top 3 mobile games list.
So many idle games have an exponential structure but hide it behind, idk, buying new equipment or facilities or whatever. This is an adorable deconstruction of the genre which reduces it purely to Number Go Up.
This game has actually made us smarter we are about to reach graduation and we are having so much fun this game is PEAK.
Very fun game, lots of stuff to do. We are having fun and like that it has offline progress.
Its an idle Management game. Go in it with that mindset and you will have a blast.
You wont find an idle game more respectful of the player. No forced ads after purchase, no ads whatsoever after purchase. No other purchases available besides removing ads. This game was not built to siphon money towards the dev, it was built to be fun (if you like this sort of thing).
We wish we can custom the bottons. For example, Im way beyond ee20000 and the achievements has become completely useless. It would be Even better if we can change the theory shown at the Open-Screen summary.
1e3 is supposed to be 1 followed by 3 zeroes but this game doesnt understand that at least initially.
Make each puzzle smaller. Easy- 2×2 Medium- 3×3 Hard- 4×4.
Just a great idle game if you like math :).
Ill keep it simple, stupid. In depth descriptions of every part of the game (with the addition of humor). Absolutely no forced ads. The game feels like it was made by a player not a developer (in a good way). Not a long, nor descriptive review but we feel it deserves something.
The game starts out slow, it seems like youre going nowhere. You make some sacrifices and it seems like youre back to square one, except youre coming back quicker and quicker.
NO required ads, AMAZING gameplay, and SO FUN. Please play this game if you like incremental games or even if you dont like incremental games. Either way, its so fun.
Wow. Im still early in our play through, but seeing a double exponent of 200+ is insane. Theres 200 digits in the number that describes the number of digits of the final value. Insanity. Vastly larger than any number that could be physically expressed in this universe. Love it.
We've enjoyed it so far, its a very unique take on an idle game and the community behind it is very strong. Would play again 5/5.
This is a very great game! There should be more games like this, but we just have one problem. Whenever you collect your idle rewards, and go to 15 puzzle, the blocks start glitching out. Even though that problem exists, we think this is the best game we have seen so far.
Theres no ads for it despite what it may look like its not too complicated. Theres multiple layers of prestige. Theres only one in app purchase and its only two dollars. We havent gotten it though if we could rate higher, we would.
Would be nice to see how long until you reach the next chapter.
We love the look of everything. Its almost ASMR-y to have it running in the background. Suggestion, not complaint. Maybe different color palettes, adjustable scales of the different lines of algorithms, exponents, numbers running.
We feel the way the db Graduation Research is handled should be changed because we did the math in Desmos and the highest nember it would let us try as an input resulted in an output of about 56 meanwhile we can just Research the Star one more and multiply everything by over 1.61 million and quickly rising. For reference, for every Research into Stars, we need to do FOUR Research into db, which is NOT economically viable.
Really good but needs more updates almost at leaderboard lol.
There are no ads with or without Wi-Fi. That makes it the only mobile exclusive game with no forced ads. Also, this game has a real story and actually fun gameplay. You cant get better than that. But wait! It also has good visuals! Strange notation/10.
Great balance of idle to active; constant progress; fun minigames.
One of the only non-micro transaction idle games out there, great if youre into idle games and stem in general.
In this game the graphics are amazing the gameplay is ever evolving and nothing is stagnant.we really feel like a variable increasing the height of a graph when we play this game.
Exponential idle is not a game, its a lifestyle and a culture. Our life has completely changed after downloading this game. We have lost everything we had except for this game. We were fired from our job for exponential idling too competitively. We now live in a homeless shelter and survive off of social security checks. We need food stamps to survive now, we have lost everything from this game. Our wife divorced us, and took the kids. Bertha was originally supportive of our idling lifestyle. But then as the debt grew, she became more discriminatory about our idling culture. We decided that she was the issue and needed to be erased from our life. We have given you everything, and in return we have achieved eternal happiness knowing that we are the greatest idler to ever exist. -Brian Zang Sub.
If u like see number get big but dont want to pay to win then play this game.
Just kidding, off to grinding more arrow puzzles for the next variable.
Obviously there is waiting involved (its in the name of the game) but after a bit there is a good bit to do and solve. No necessary in game purchases nor ads. Even when you leave the game it continues without you and after a bit you can automate things making leaving easier. We pick up the game for maybe 5 minutes every few hours and the point where we are in the game. We are very satisfied with how simplistic this game is on the surface but we know there was some serious math involved in the creation of this and we give props to the creators for there hard work. 10/10 game amazing.
No ads Good game mechanics Novel math-inspired.
Like the ironic story, lots of ironic jokes on academic life. Cant help smiling every time reading the lore when a new chapter is unlocked.
Typical idle games are soulless and mindless games that have no substance. This one is far different. Every stage of the game is new and rewarding. Figuring out the mini game puzzles is gratifying. We did have to look up the arrow ones but even figuring out those algorithms was fun. As soon as a part of the game gets boring, the process gets automated. Fantastic free to play idle game not littered with micro transactions, with some soul put into it. Also, try to do secret achievement 13 without looking it up. Youll feel like a detective.
This game has a very interesting concept and accompanying storyline to follow a traditional idle experience. No involuntary ads and ads are not necessary to progress at a reasonable rate. There are a few bugs including some "soft crashes" where the game will stop functioning but will not automatically close, but nothing that a quick restart wont fix :).
This game at first appears to be just a smarter, but more simple design. No cookies to click. Just a mathematical equation. As you continuously progress in the game you get to experience the complex equations that start to happen. Adding more variables using Stars which unlike most idle games is able to get while having fun. Just as we started thinking wow, this game really isnt that fun. We got to the prestige part, we had clicked the first equation about 8,000 times. We reached a point where our f(t) wasnt going up that much anymore and then we became able to prestige. This changed everything we were then getting higher and higher until we reached around ee100 then we got introduced to Supremacy. Eventually getting auto buyers, then an auto prestiger. We could then AFK for around 4-8 hours come back and supremacy. We are currently sitting at ee730 and waiting to get the achievement for reaching ee777.
Pleasant to look at, nice progression curve with some puzzly stuff sometimes, not totally obvious optimization, some choices, some stuff to do to speed up the early game. A good idle game imo.
A very good idea for a game executed very well, really fun and would recommend.
This is quite literally the perfect mobile game. No ads. Not painful to play. Sense of progression thats kept us playing for close to twenty hours of in-game time, with more to come. Its perfect.
When we first downloaded this game, we were bit expecting much. Just another idle game (which we are admittedly a fan of) that we might drop after a few weeks. However, we were surprised at the depth of this game and how well the gameplay integrates into the story. We especially enjoy the theories, though we do wish they would be better explained. For example, we dont fully understand Numerical Methods and a short explanation of what each variable means would benefit us a lot instead of jumping right in into the symbols and notation. Overall, though, a very good game. There are some slow parts and some guesswork involved, but we enjoy the grind.
But it seems that there are two spaces in the app title. Thats our only problem with it honestly.
After unlocking recurrence relations, our progress has just stagnated. Ive tried using 100s of thousands of stars to try and upgrade variables and many different combinations of student upgrades, but at this point every prestige takes more than a day and its been a while since a supremacy. Im positive that we can be doing something better but the game gives you very little instruction. Still, up to this point its been a nice game when Im bored, and we appreciate how there are no ads unless you initiate them.
After watching the advertisement, the advertisement can't be closed and can't be rewarded.
Puzzle game more like. Why make an idle game if you're going to gate everything behind extremely boring tedious puzzles that have nothing to do with the math. We really want to like this game and give it 5 stars, but the puzzles completely ruin it.
Why does an incremental game need to track our activities across apps? Instant uninstall; what a shady practice.
When we lost some save data we contacted the developer and he fixed it for us. Highly recommend the game to anyone who likes idle games and math.
Just like our PhD life. 5 out of 5. Would recommend.
Like all idle games, its the best with friends.
Amazing, tons of content to unpack, and layers upon layers of new features.
User feedback from Apple App Store
App Details
- Version: 1.4.40
- Size: 94.95 MB
- iOS: 8.0 or later
- Languages: AR, CS, NL, EN, FI, FR, DE, HE, HU, ID, IT, JA, KO, LV, LT, NB, FA, PL, PT, RU, SR, ZH, SK, ES, ZH, TR, UK, VI
- Content Advisory:
- Developer: Gilles-Philippe Paille
Last updated: 10th March 2025 | Genre: Casual, Simulation | Developer: Gilles-Philippe Paille