Last updated on December 8th, 2025 at 07:52 pm
Chessify – Magic Chess Tools – Lifestyle Game Review
Chessify – Magic Chess Tools is a Lifestyle/Strategy/Board game from Chessify, Inc., first launched in 4th August 2018.
It’s rated 4+ and currently has 375+ ratings on the App Store.
What Makes Chessify – Magic Chess Tools Stand Out
Improve your playing level and skills with our magic chess tools: a chess scanner for real chessboards, books, and diagrams, a unique video finder, and a Superfast cloud engine. Analyze puzzles and games with Stockfish 16 Play chess with friends online or challenge the computer for an offline game.
Features you’ll find ONLY on Chessify:
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The Perfect Chessboard Scanner
Take a photo of a real chessboard to get its digitized version on your phone or scan chess puzzles from printed or digital sources with 99% accuracy. -
Chess PDF Reader & Scanner
Upload a book to keep track of your reading as well as scan and analyze its puzzles. -
Superfast Cloud Chess Engine
Analyze with Stockfish 16 on Chessify's up to 100,000 kN/s CLOUD server, which is typically 20X faster than a local chess engine. -
Video Finder
Play some opening moves and use the search button to find related videos on YouTube & chesslecture.com (Pro). By clicking on a video, you will get to watch it from the second when the searched position first appears in it. -
High-Quality VIDEO
Share chess games as videos on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media or messaging apps. -
Watch Chess LIVE with Strong Cloud Analysis by Lc0 & Stockfish
Follow the games of the strongest grandmasters LIVE with simultaneous cloud analysis by Stockfish 16 and LCZero. Get notified about the top events (like the World Chess Championship or FIDE Candidates) before their start.
We also provide many basic features to help you learn chess easier:
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ANALYZE with STOCKFISH
Enjoy free chess engine analysis by Stockfish 16 when you need to find the right moves and tactics in puzzles or the mistakes you made in your recent game. -
Play Chess OFFLINE against STOCKFISH
Choose a difficulty level and play a free offline game against the world’s best chess engine from a starting position or your current analysis board. -
Learn chess theory with the Opening Explorer
Find the most popular moves in the given opening using the LiChess DATABASE of 2 million OTB games of 2200+ FIDE rated players. -
Import & export FEN/PGN
Export the PGN files of your games or copy the FENs of puzzles to share them with other chess apps if needed. Use the ‘paste PGN/FEN’ option to import a game into Chessify. -
Edit board
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SAVE games and positions directly on the app
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SHARE games
Share chess puzzles as IMAGE and games as PGN on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media or messaging apps. -
Play real-time Blitz ONLINE
Choose a standard time control or create your own one and send the invitation link to your friend challenging them to a chess game. Play online with other users who search for the same time control. -
CHESS CLOCK
Choose a time control (Fischer, Bronstein, Delay, etc), set the time, and play chess with friends on a real chessboard. -
Chess for Kids
Apply parental control to disable chess engine analysis for kids. -
Available in 9 LANGUAGES
English, Russian, French, German, Spanish, Norwegian, Armenian, Italian, & Portuguese.
Read the Terms of Use here: https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/
Available memberships in the app:
Bronze: $0.99/month ($9.99/year)
2D/3D scans: 1000
SuperFast engine: 1,000 seconds
Silver: $2.99/month ($29.99/year)
2D/3D scans: unlimited
SuperFast engine: 5,000 seconds
PRO video views: 25
Gold: $9.99/month ($99.99/year)
2D/3D scans: unlimited
SuperFast engine: 40,000 seconds
PRO video views: 100
PDF scans: 10
Prices may vary based on your location.
Enjoy an ad-free experience regardless of your plan. Sign up for free to increase your monthly limits of our premium features.
This Lifestyle game offers engaging gameplay and regular updates for mobile players.
Player Feedback
As a newer release, Chessify – Magic Chess Tools is building its player community. Early feedback suggests .
Recent Updates & Development
Latest Update: 15th January 2024
Recent improvements include:
- Updated Stockfish version to 16
- Minor bug fixes
Download & Availability
Chessify – Magic Chess Tools is available through the official App Store for iOS devices.
Get Chessify – Magic Chess Tools 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:
A simple access to stockfish. Great analyser.
We read a lot of chess books and spend too much time setting up all the positions they are going over. We got this app so we can take a picture of the board in the book, and play out the position easily without spending time on setup. This app is perfect for that and seems to do other stuff too.
This used to be great: cloud chess engine much more powerful than a good PC, on your phone, for a reasonable price. Now the speed (nps) of Superfast analysis is abysmal – our phone czn fo same or better, for free. In addition, very often the app does bot even get past the starting screen, basically does not work at all. This is unfortunate because they website , separate from this app subscription, is still great (they need to optimize their interface, but analysis speed is excellent).
Developers do not respond for help. Create a game does not open. It is dead. The first time used was ok, but then when trying to play machine again, the program goes limbo.
App used to scan positions and have analysis. Now the scanning functionality doesnt render correctly. They also added a paywall. We dont mind supporting developers, but adding a paywall for an app where its most basic functionality doesnt work is ridiculous.
The subject says it all. Boards are no longer scanned successfully.
We love the app, but when doing analysis and running Stockfish we can see that someone is better but how do we know which color pieces have the advantage. It appears to be the same color for both. Some indication of who is better would be great.
So we were told in needed to purchase to scan a book pdf but the app defaults to silver which wont scan books. Trusting the app we paid for the silver but then realized the mistake as it still wouldnt scan the pdf. So we upgraded to gold. But the broken app still shows we have silver year even though we paid for the one month of gold. So we tried to cancel everything and get our money back but cancelling not available for a couple days. Then the gold was able to be canceled but not the silver. Just avoid the whole mess. A nightmare and basically they took the money and we got nothing of what we wanted and we cant get a refund. Buyer beware.
This app makes it so much easier to study chess! We much prefer to study with books and this app makes that process much more efficient, saving us the time from setting up a position.
Excellent tool for chess players to study from books.It is accurate to scan the diagram and so convenient to save as PGN to analyze on the mobile or PC.
Would be five star if there weren't a limit in cloud analysis.
This is the only app we found for iOS to scan image and recognizes the position accurately. Can you please make it able to share position to Lichess app? Edit : yes it does work , we forgot to edit our review . Great app! Thanks.
The rotation goes back to landscape after we scan a position. Very annoying.
Asks us to log in via gmail or Facebook or our phone number Also, when we start an analysis, we can only see the analysis of we switch to another app and then come back to Chessify. At least that was yesterday. Now, we cant see the analysis at all. Useless.
First off this app is great so far we are able to organize Chess boards from a book we are studying. However, When we take photos of boards our photos show newest at the Top For some reason when looking at our photos from this App it switched the order of just the boards. This is just the data entry phase very boring and cookie cutter Its amazing how wrong you can be when entering information for the wrong board. Its actually making our head spin Just letting you know this happened Again this app looks like exactly what we are looking for to organize our study of this book Keep you updated on how it goes.
We use this app primarily to solve tactics puzzles so we rely on the camera scan function a lot. However, 3 out of 5 times we scan a board the recognition is buggy. Either the board GUI is completely blank, or it shows an initial board. Missing a rank or file is not even failure to us since it at least recognizes part of the board. We subscribe to the analysis service but this scan bug makes the app essentially unusable. We hope it could be fixed in the coming updates.
Used to be a great app, now u only get 5mins of use before it paywalls you. Oh, and the meter runs all the time as it analyzes to ridiculous depths nobody needs, u cant make it stop at like depth 22 after a couple of secs, no it doesnt stop, it keeps burning thru your time. We now give it our lowest rating: Garbage App.
The ability to scan printed chess positions and have the app convert to playable positions with ability to export to any program opens up a new universe: the connection of printed chess books to ChessBase and similar programs. Well played, developers.
This was a best app in this field But now just want to get money for subscribe.
We really think this app is gonna help take our game to a new level.
Great app. Question: Is there a way to analyze using Lc0? The only engines we see are Stockfish 11 and Superfast. Thank you.
Taking a picture of a chess board does not work as expected. We took a screenshot of chess.com and fed it that and it couldnt even get that.
Everything about it is perfect except one problem… On to the good things: -Not only is the latest version of Stockfish (right now SF 11) included, but it is on CLOUD which means it will be stronger than analysis ran on your phone! This is a dream come true -Live stream function allows you to browse games of current tournaments which is another dream come true for a serious chess player. -Database is great to have on an app in a first place and we're pretty sure it is regularly updated! This is also great -Can save PGNs and store a sort of database -A lot of people like the fact that you can take a picture of a 2D chess board and run it there, which is really nice to have, although it serves no purpose for us psrsonally. We would imagine it is very useful if you have a hard example from a book you want to take a picture of. For most exercises though we just solve in our head, and for running through full on games the picture taking doesnt help that in any way, so we don't really know how to make use of the camera function. But again, a lot of people seem to like it Maybe there are some other features we are missing, but the fact that it has a cloud stored chess engine is more than we could ask for. This and the livestream function are the best features in our personal opinion! Now on to the disappointment: -Cannot write comments on moves. Why? This app is so good otherwise but you cannot write comments on any of your moves!? The point of analyzing games is to write notes to yourself! This is an essential element and we think the app developer should make it possible. In an app called "Analyze This" (which is also pretty nice) you can write comments as well as symbols with sidelines/variations and save it all. We wish this app could do that. We strongly recommend this app to anybody, the live stream function is just so great. It is really good to watch ongoing high level games and this app seems to monitor pretty much all the ones that exist to the public.
Is there any hope to have the OCR determine the board range without having to zoom if the screenshot is super clear.
We have been looking for an app for a while to scan paper puzzles. This app comes very close. When u scan it gets most of the positions correct except for some reason queen (color) and Bishop. Minor thing! Thanks for the app. Update: 11/7. Not sure what has changed. Now the scanning is totally off. Not off by one or two pieces but off by most of the pieces. Something got really messed up in updates. We have sent errors through app. Thanks Update 12/24: recognition is much better again. Thanks Future feature suggestion: after scanning a position if there is an option to play against computer. Basically we are reading a book (silmans) and it gives challenging end games. We want to try out all the positions against computer. Thanks and happy holidays.
Great app we hope you make a version for IPad Thanks.
We would only ask for a connection windows.
The Scan function alone would make this app a must-have. The other features are more than icing. Thanks.
Wont scan diagrams on computer just keeps thinking.
We love that we can save a game, but Id love to add more moves to it after re-opening, save again for later without having to save to a new board. Or am we missing something.
Scan(photo) and analyze. Very helpful when do chess puzzle on paper books.
Works really well and we learned a lot.
Scan from camera often has a mistake or two but no big deal. Whats most lacking is the ability to use the scans as tactics problems ie seeing if you can work out the best move and have the software tell you if you were correct or not without going into analysis mode.
One of our biggest complaints with this app is how easily it just loses the position when your device goes on standby. We understand theres a save feature, but most of the time we get sidetracked by something and dont remember to save. Please implement an auto-save of some kind if app cant stay running in a low-power state in the background. Also, iPad support should be a no brainer here. Are there plans for iPad support soon.
When we try to scan a position a all we get is a black box in the camera view. Our camera works otherwise and we gave the app permission to use it, but it just doesnt work.
Like the concept but couldnt get it to scan or set up from photo. Able to set up board but other apps already do that.
The rotation button in the scan UI doesnt do anything. Everything else about this app is great.
Capture from photo library omits first row of chessboard no matter the size. It requires manual setup. After the analysis finishes, when you click the forward button to see the suggested move it thinks pawns are moving the wrong way and instantly promotes first rank pawns to a queen (backwards). This app is a mess. Do not waste your time.
The buttons for scan, analyze, clock, and settings, are not clickable. IOS 10.3.3.
Excellent in scanning and placing the board correctly, also can help you analyze the game. Make things easier for you, thank you :).
Im so excited to get started using this app! We found the app on Android platform some time ago but it wasnt on iOS yet. We powered up an old Note II and experimented with the features: it was so impressive to see what the app did and how it makes it so simple to take a position from a book or a print out and scan the position into an app to be manipulated, analyzed, etc. Thank you guys at Chessify for a great app.
User feedback from Apple App Store
App Details
- Version: 6.4.2
- Size: 62.13 MB
- iOS: 13.0 or later
- Languages: HY, EN, FR, DE, IT, NB, PT, RU, ES
- Content Advisory:
- Developer: [Chessify, Inc.]()
Last updated: 15th January 2024 | Genre: Lifestyle, Strategy | Developer: Chessify, Inc.