Last updated on January 3rd, 2026 at 09:58 pm
Sven's SudokuPad – Casual Game Review
Sven's SudokuPad is a Casual/Puzzle game from Sven Neumann, first launched in 16th July 2021.
It’s rated 4+ and currently has 110+ ratings on the App Store.
What Makes Sven's SudokuPad Stand Out
Sven's SudokuPad finally lets you play your own Sudoku puzzles in the same app as used by Cracking the Cryptic in their videos. Created by Sven, the same developer who has created and improved the Cracking the Cryptic Sudoku webapp over the past year.
It also includes a few brand new classic Sudokus created by Simon and Mark exclusively for Sven's SudokuPad.
This Casual game offers engaging gameplay and regular updates for mobile players.
Player Feedback
As a newer release, Sven's SudokuPad is building its player community. Early feedback suggests .
Recent Updates & Development
Latest Update: 9th December 2021
Recent improvements include:
Various bug fixes and improvements
Option to paste link inside app
Download & Availability
Sven's SudokuPad is available through the official App Store for iOS devices.
Get Sven's SudokuPad 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:
Obviously if you have this app, you know cracking the cryptic. We find that most of the complaints are that there is only a limited set of puzzles (true) but since its more of an importer app for cracking the cryptic + a few puzzles, this isnt really a problem. Ive solved hundreds of puzzles because the UI for this app is just simply perfect. The fact that you have two versions of notes, you can color the boxes, you can highlight multiple numbers at the same time.. To die for! Ive genuinely ely had no regrets buying this and have been using it for years lol. This is also our first app review (at least from what we remember) but we feel the need to review because we love love this app so much.
It supports Snyder notation and cell notation. We were getting stuck using the NYT games app, which doesnt let you have do both.
We've had a lot of fun using this app, it makes solving sudokus much easier. However the web version still has more features that we hope will be implemented like being able to use letters, and cage sums calculators etc. Also please add more colors.
Terrific app. Such a great experience for such a tricky situation solving sudoku variants on your phone. Ive gotten hundreds of hours of enjoyment out of it with no end in sight. We only wish this app had the letter option that the webapp has! Sven? Any chance? Thank you for a really great app.
Very easy to enter classic sudoku puzzles and solve them, and to solve any sudoku puzzle that has been entered into it that you have a link for, including variants. We love the way the solve interface works, too. Outstanding.
This app allows you to upload hand crafted puzzles from all over the internet, especially those from Cracking the Cryptic. Its still evolving, though, so some older puzzles wont check quite right, or the rules for variants wont be complete. But the ability to load up and try truly unusual variant puzzles is great, and the interface is solid, with options for how to mark that should satisfy most solvers. A great supplement to Cracking the Cryptics other collections.
Downloaded the app as a way of supporting Sven and the CtC channel since we cant afford a Patreon commitment or anything else. The app itself is obviously great, and as others have said, its pretty much the best interface Ive come across for solving sudokus. We wish the feature to input your own puzzles allowed for variations like arrows, killer cages, etc since those things are supported by the app (whenever you import a puzzle from CtC, it has all those features). Im someone who is interested in learning to set puzzles, and we would love it if this app were our tool for doing so. (Also, pen tool plz. >.<) Thanks for the app regardless! Its great to have the chance to solve some of the crazy puzzles you see on CtC.
It gets 5 stars for being the only app of its kind on iOS to allow solving puzzles from all over the internet. Previously, we had a huge bookmark folder of puzzles we had to wait until we were on a desktop to solve, but now we can solve them on our phone, and that is a beautiful thing. Some suggestions: The process of cleaning up pencilmarks can be rather tedious, so auto-pencilmark elimination in row/column when placing digits would be a very nice feature to have as something that could be enabled in settings. Also, while long pressing on a cell highlight similar cells, it would be nice to be able to do this highlighting from the number pad with a long press. For example, if we wanted to highlight all cells with corner marked 5s, we could go to corner marks and hold the 5 button to do so. Currently, we have to have a corner marked 5 with no other corner marks to highlight just the 5s. Some sort of cloud syncing would also be nice so people could continue playing puzzles on different devices. Those features missing aside, this is still the best iOS app for solving sudokus and has earned all 5 of these stars until that stops being true. Edit: also auto-pausing the clock when switching apps would be good. There is some glitchy behavior with the clock in general, but we are not personally reliant on it.
This is a great app to do Sudoku on. Just wish it was easier to get more puzzles on here. Its $3, but after we finish the puzzles on there we have to put in the work to add more puzzles. Another feature that would also be nice to have, is when you put in a number in a cell, all the pencil marks either in that row/column or box for that number disappear. Just an idea. But overall, great app.
Please fix the cage bug – cage color is being changed from black to white, so cages are invisible. This bug has been in the app for a long time. Please fix.
This is a great app for solving the Cracking the Cryptic hand-crafted puzzles featured on the YT channel, as well as any other Sudoku puzzle that you care to enter manually. Puzzles are stored locally, offline, and completion times are stored, so you can build up a nice library of puzzles, abandon a puzzle and pick up where you left off weeks or months later, and compete against your best times. However, this iOS app has fallen far behind the web app in features, and some of the puzzles featured on the CtC YT channel are much harder to solve in this app as a result. Unfortunately, the web app does not scale nicely to mobile touch interfaces and provides no mechanism for storing puzzles. This app needs an update.
This continues to be, by far, our favorite method for solving sudokus. The newer features of the web version (e.g., letter tool, enhanced pen features, killer cage calculator) make it even better and we wish some of these made it to the iOS version as well.
This is a wonderful app to solve the puzzles featured on the channel, however, there's some key features in the web app that are missing from this. Notably, the letter function, the extra colors, diagonal lines on the line tool, and the new fog of war mechanic are missing. The latter is, albeit, quite new, but seeing as this hasn't been updated in 11 months, adding at least some of the new things would be great. Additionally, the ability to detect if a solution is correct for irregular or otherwise "non-normal" sudoku puzzles would be most welcome. When we do complete one of those, it is often marked as wrong and therefore incomplete, so we usually just delete it from the app. Overall though, it works superbly well for almost every puzzle.
We absolutely adore SudokuPad, it is the best user interface for solving sudokus bar none. The app itself has some problems though: 1. The last release was 10 months ago. A couple of killer features from the web version are missing: the letter tool and the new extended color palettes, among others. Please give us an update, Sven! 2. It appears like there is a limit to how many puzzles the app can save: after a couple of months of use, new puzzles stopped getting saved. (Lost progress can be very frustrating!) Ive worked around this by deleting and reinstalling the app, but at the cost of loosing all our favourite puzzles and their solutions. 3. Under iOS, MacOS and iPadOS, the UI doesnt work as well as it does on a windows machine. In Safari in particular, some keybindings clash with app shortcuts, making things like the letter tool unusable. 4. The number of clicks to go through from a CTC youtube video to opening and saving a puzzle is far too many 5. Opening a puzzle link twice can lead to an infinite save dialog loop Rating 4 stars anyway, because when it works, its excellent.
Great app for solving sudokus. We wish the timer would automatically pause when exiting the app or locking your phone though.
We love this app and the YouTube channel so much!!! The one thing we would prefer is to have an account system so we can share progress and puzzles between the Steam version and the app version.
We love CTC and we love the dual pencil notation idea of Svens solver. However, there are a few quirks we think could be improved. Double-tapping an empty cell deselects everything else, but the taps have to be spaced precisely for this to work. There is a little empty space in the bottom left corner of the screen, maybe tapping there could unselect everything. We would LOVE a way to select all pencil marks of a certain candidate. The other CTC apps do this and its very convenient. Double-tapping a filled cell highlights all cells of that number. This is helpful, but it would be great if selecting a digit in the number pad did this. Maybe each version of the number pad (number, corner marks, and center marks) could highlight all candidates of that type. This app is SO CLOSE to being the perfect solver, especially with the ability to enter puzzles. We agree with the other reviewer that an auto-detector would be amazing, but not necessary for a perfect app. The suggestions above (especially the ability to highlight all of a particular candidate) would make it a perfect solver. Thanks Sven.
The tools from cracking the cryptic are definitely available here. That is awesome. We would love to see two updates though. First we would love to see the ability to change the font-size of the corner pencil-marks. In our opinion being able to make them smaller would make it easier to differentiate center marks from pencil marks. Second we would like to see the ability to import puzzles via camera or an imported photo.
When using the CtC web site to solve puzzles you can add pencil marks and when you solved a number the pencil marks associated with that number in the same columns and rows would disappear. Missing that in this app. Wish it was their. We tend to make mistakes because of pencil marked numbers left behind.
The best part of this app is the auto import from CtCs YouTube channel. Being able to simply import the puzzles makes trying new puzzles a breeze. The UI is also easy and intuitive, though it has some quirksmore later. The maddeningly worst part of the app is that updates discard all saved puzzles and progress, resetting it to a fresh install. Id take 2 stars off but that would be a bit unfair. We cant stress how aggravating it is to have some puzzles that you want to save be lost. Tracking those down is not a simple processes, and even when you do, your progress is lost. The documentation could be improved. There are lots of hidden shortcuts that you eventually stumble upon, but are not obvious; for instances, simple ways to remove pencil marks but not center numbers. It is also a bit jolting since the UI is very different from other CtC apps, but you do get used to the difference after a while. Some suggested improvements: It would be very useful to allow puzzles to be renamed and also support notes. And, at least for the iPad, supporting split screen would make entering new puzzles from other sources more easy. Also, you cannot use the Apple pencil to click back to the main puzzle list. And finally, the highlight matching cells feature is quirky at best: you often have to double-click several times to get it to work.
1.3.1.1 update deleted all our existing puzzles. We were building up a nice library so its a bit sad. Still a great app overall and hopefully future updates wont have the same problem.
Best app for solving puzzles entered from any source manually (or via a link for CtC puzzles). Loses at least a star for updates deleting all saved puzzles and all progress made on the puzzles bundled with the app. This is a huge bummer. Be prepared to lose everything or never update. Would be great if the dev used iCloud to save puzzles and be able to pick up progress on another device.
Just a warning this update deleted all of our existing puzzles :(.
This is a great app for creating and solving hand-crafted puzzles. Puzzles are stored locally, offline, and completion times are stored, so you can build up a nice library of puzzles, abandon a puzzle and pick up where you left off weeks or months later, and compete against your best times. The app offers three kinds of in-cell notes, one using color and two different ways of notating numbers. However, this iOS app has fallen far behind the web app in features, and some of the puzzles available for download into the app are much harder to solve in this version. Additionally, some features appear to be broken. Most seriously, the feature that shows the defined rules for a particular puzzle rarely transfer over to the app, leaving the user guessing what the correct rules is. Unfortunately, the web app does not scale nicely to mobile touch interfaces and provides no mechanism for saving puzzles. This app needs an update.
You can upload puzzles from the website to play, which is super-cool, but the rules specific to each puzzle dont follow. Its a bummer.
Sometimes puzzles lose the name and description when you import them into the app, and there is no way to change the name of puzzles that you didnt create.
We saw the reviews, decided to try anyway because its the only Sudoku app Ive seen that lets you create games. The problem is that with ever other Sudoku app, they let you mark down all possible numbers for any given spot. This is usually why we like Sudoku apps over pen and paper because Im not marking up our pages just to keep track. This one, for whatever reason, doesnt seem to have that? We dont know if we just cant find it or if its just not there, but Im going to assume if they arent going to make it obvious how to find it, then its likely not there. If its added, then we would be all for it, buuut it somehow feels incredibly lacking for an app with a price point.
Great little app, but missing features compared to the web version, such as fog.
This is by far, the best sudoku app out there, but it is in desperate need of an update. We dont even use it anymore, just the web app. We wish Sven would update this and the one in Steam.
It is a great companion app for Cracking the Cryptic fans. However, compare to Cracking the Cryptic app, Mac support fo this app is dismal. We can't even use keypad to enter numbers. Cracking the Cryptic app (written by the same person) at least has some support for Mac but this one needs the same level of care.
There is no fog in the fog of war puzzles and as simon would say thats cheating.
We thought itd be a copy of the CTC web app. And the puzzles Id create, Ill be able to share it as link of the web app. Turns out its its own thing! The other party has to own the app as well to be able to play the puzzles we created.
Theres no question that Svens app is the best Sudoku app available to download. But unfortunately its not the best Sudoku app available. That would be Svens web version of the app. Over the past year, that app has consistently received more and more improvements, enhancements, and features, while those of us who downloaded the iOS version have been left behind. Its gotten to the point where we no longer even bother opening the app any longer to play CTC puzzles, because playing on the web is such a better experience.
Very good app for adding and solving puzzles, BUT the app freezes most of the time on the loading screen, and we have to close/reopen many times or start it and then leave it for several minutes before it will open.
Quite often when opening a puzzle from the web into the app, the instructions/rules are lost and revert to a default. Please please fix this if you can.
Cant click in cells so cant enter numbers or do anything in the Mac app. The online and iPhone work as far as we can tell, but the Mac app . Nothing.
It only creates basic sudoku puzzles and nothing like you see on the internet. A total waste of money.
Very disappointed to see this app missing so many features available on the web version. We downloaded this app to use on planes when we dont have internet access, but its not really usable for some of the puzzles with newer mechanics like fog. We emailed the developer but never got a response.
We bought this app so we could follow along with the puzzles on the channel. We kept getting kicked off on our web browser and it would reset the puzzle, deleting all our work. We got the app to try to resolve this issue, but then realized that we cant do any of the fog of war puzzles on the app. This was very disappointing as those are our favorite puzzles so we still end up using the web browser and risk getting reset. There are other features on the web version that would be very useful in the app.
The web app works great. This app is missing features, and has a broken undo/redo. Sadly after we bought it Im still using the web app.
App is good but very frustrating that it is so far behind the browser version.
Extremely disappointed with this app. We were hoping we could use it to build puzzles but this was clearly not designed for that purpose. In the puzzle setting mode you cant add corner or center pencil marks or color cells different colors. The only think keeping this from a 1 star review is that it does have some good puzzles built in for you to solve, but there just arent enough of them. One other complaint – with this app being associated with Cracking the Cryptic, we expected some puzzles to feature sudoku variant rules, or the puzzle setting mode to allow adding custom rules and features to your puzzles (killer cages, thermos, etc.) but no, its classics only. Not worth the $5. It would be okay if it started free and featured only the classic puzzles, and the variants and additional classics would be locked behind a $5 paywall. If youre looking for classic sudoku puzzles to solve, just watch the Cracking the Cryptic videos on classic puzzles and solve those. If youre looking for a puzzle setting tool, just use f-puzzles or penpa.
Deleted puzzles keep coming back. Puzzles Ive started but dont finish vanish completely. Basically unusable. Even tried deleting and reinstalling.
We fill in the right numbers and it keeps telling us that we made a mistake. We want our money back.
This app started as a great idea and we immediately bought it when it came out. But over time it has started drifting from the web app and is slowly becoming unusable because the author isnt updating it. For example Killer Cages dont render visibly anymore and every time we report a bug to the author they always say it is fixed in the web app but dont ever port the fox to this app. Dont buy this until the author starts supporting it with updates.
When you select a square, it stays selected, you have to unselect it to choose the next square.
It would be nice if the app supported nonstandard sudoku rules.
Love the app and what youve done with it. One thought, theres a lot of color blind solvers out there and having an option for lightly patterned grays would be wonderful. Dots, stripes, crosshatch, zigzag, you get it.
All of a sudden no way to input pencil marks.
Nice app; we appreciate that this is still being improved on, so Im patient with little things. We wish there was a way to add notes/comments to puzzles sent by others or that have been downloaded, as there is currently no way to note the title of the puzzle or who the constructor is in the app.
User feedback from Apple App Store
App Details
- Version: 1.3.1.1
- Size: 3.16 MB
- iOS: 11.0 or later
- Languages: EN
- Content Advisory:
- Developer: [Sven Neumann]()
Last updated: 9th December 2021 | Genre: Casual, Puzzle | Developer: Sven Neumann