Surround - Online Go client

The app is best used for correspondence games. I like OGS! Note to dev: I deleted the app, and upon redownloading it and signing in I found that I was not able to access the same UI as before I deleted the app. It now is permanently on the “web version” of the app, and prompts me to log in every time I open the app.

This app is fantastic. It’s what OGS has needed for a long time. Drawback is that push notifications cost extra (pretty much THE feature if you play correspondence). This is really a shortcoming of OGS though as they don’t actually offer a push service. This forces the Surround dev to poll the server and roll their own notification server so they have to offset their costs. The real problem is that the app doesn’t load properly. Every time I open the app it’s stuck in the “loading” state. You can bypass it with a full restart of the app, but it’s a pain and feels unfinished. I contacted the dev about it and basically got “yeah I know it does that but I’m not going to take the time to fix it.” Seems like kind of lazy support for an app that’s darn near perfect. I want to give this 5 stars, but not until I see a fix. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ In any case, thanks for the good app!

I found this app completely by accident (never came up in search, which is the curse of all Go related things) and it has turned out to be all but perfect. If you play on OGS (or want to but you’re turned off by the interface) this is all you need. It’s an actual free fully featured OGS client, with the only upsell being a tiny subscription fee if you want push notifications for your games. There is currently a very small bug in the chat feature but after emailing the developer Khoa, they responded promptly to let me know it has been fixed in the next release and shared a TestFlight link to download the improved dev version. They are clearly in it for the love and not for the money, so if this review is corny, it’s only because I feel likes this kind of work deserves some love in return.