KenKen Classic

Been doing Ken Ken for years. I play two 6x6 Hard games a day, one with only Add functions, and the other with all four arithmetic functions: Add/Subtract/Multiply/Divide. The games with all four functions are a little easier because 5’s can’t be in Division blocks and are thus easier to place. I like the 6x6 Hard games because they are challenging but can still usually be completed in less than 10 minutes. The user interface is wonderful, allowing you to add notes (candidates) to help solve the puzzle, and great Undo/Redo options, but I try to solve them using pure logic, without notes or either-or guesses. Of course, if all else fails, I do whatever it takes. No puzzle can escape being eventually solved.

Beginning with iOS 14, I get an iOS popup ("KENKEN pasted from <app>") whenever KenKen Classic version 2.7 moves to the foreground, telling me that KenKen Classic is reading my clipboard. This is even though I have not tried to paste anything into it. Since KenKen Classic hasn't been updated in about a year, it has been doing this to all of us for at least that long, and silently before iOS 14 started telling us. I'm sure that we all copy and paste information that is no business of KenKen's developer, yet this developer has been silently slurping it all up until recently, for undocumented purposes. Because of this, I am deleting this app until 1) the developer KenKen Puzzle, LLC comes clean on this practice, tells us precisely why and for what purpose it has been doing this, and posts an update that fixes this privacy problem; or 2) Apple releases an updated iOS that gives us the ability to block this type of behavior. (2) may not be enough, given that KenKen Puzzle, LLC has already abused its trust. Do you copy passwords or other sensitive text to your clipboard? Do you copy photos with sensitive GPS location information in them? If so, then you should worry about this too.

I ways introduced to KenKen puzzles at school a few years ago and completely fell in love with them and would always do them. I later on found this app and it was perfect for a while, but then ran into an issue. The app only allows you to play 50 puzzles for free, then you have to pay to get more puzzles. I mean, I was super happy while I had those 50 free puzzles, but now I’ve used them all up and can no longer play anymore puzzles, causing the app to no longer have a purpose for me. I would love to buy more puzzles for this, but my parents wouldn’t want to pay for 30 or more puzzles just for it to be 3 days later and having to buy more because I’ve used them all up again. I’ve tried to delete and reinstall the app to see if it would just reset everything and I could just pick 50 new puzzles to do and not care about my old data, but when I reinstalled the app it kept my old data and I still couldn’t play more puzzles. I want to continue playing this game, but I can’t without purchasing more puzzles, which isn’t really an option for me at this point.