App Profile: Sven's SudokuPad

MrItty

Rating: 3/5

There’s no question that Sven’s app is the best Sudoku app available to download. But unfortunately it’s not the best Sudoku app available. That would be Sven’s 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. It’s gotten to the point where I no longer even bother opening the app any longer to play CTC puzzles, because playing on the web is such a better experience.

stepwisecliche

Rating: 5/5

It gets 5 stars for being the only app of its kind on iOS to allow solving puzzles from all over the internet. Previously, I had a huge bookmark folder of puzzles I had to wait until I was on a desktop to solve, but now I can solve them on my 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 I wanted to highlight all cells with corner marked 5s, I could go to corner marks and hold the 5 button to do so. Currently, I 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 I am not personally reliant on it.

Ian Denker

Rating: 4/5

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 I do complete one of those, it is often marked as wrong and therefore incomplete, so I usually just delete it from the app. Overall though, it works superbly well for almost every puzzle!