By Maia fans, for Maia fans. Mobile Maia is a community project for playing and studying chess with Maia on Android. It will always be free, never show ads, and always remain open source.
What we’re working towards
- Control over settings. Let players adjust Maia’s rating, move variety, timing, and analysis settings.
- Keep up with Maia. Follow Maia’s development and make new models available on Android.
- Understand its choices. Show Maia’s move probabilities and explain how settings affect move selection.
- Play on screen or on a board. Support in-app play and physical electronic chessboards.
- Useful game options. Support multiple stacked premoves, flexible time controls, takebacks, and draw offers.
- More languages. Make Mobile Maia accessible to chess players in their own language, with help from community contributors.
The app uses the human-like Maia-3 79M model from the University of Toronto’s Computational Social Science Lab for play and analysis, alongside Stockfish for comparison and game review. Everything runs locally on your phone, without an account or Internet connection.
Choose a Maia level from 600 to 2600, compare the move a person is likely to play with Stockfish's best move, or run a complete game review without a daily quota. Mobile Maia is an independent community project released under AGPL-3.0-only.
Join the Mobile Maia community on Flotilla to ask questions, share games, discuss settings, and help test Preview. We’re starting with a small pilot, currently limited to 10 members. You’ll need a Flotilla/Nostr account to join.
Please keep using the relevant GitHub issue tracker for reproducible bugs and feature requests.
- F-Droid: Install through the official F-Droid repository.
- Direct APK: Download the latest Stable release from GitHub.
- Obtainium: Install and receive updates from GitHub releases.
- Zapstore: Install from the developer-published listing.
F-Droid updates become available after its separate reproducible-build process completes.
A progressive web app (PWA) version is being developed at mobilemaia.org. You can already try Mobile Maia in your browser using the smaller Maia-3 5M model. The current browser edition is not yet an installable or offline PWA.
- Community
- Download and install
- Mobile Maia 2.5
- Feature guide
- Google Play, iPhone, and forks
- Support and contributing
- Build and reproducibility
- Re-export Maia-3
- Credits and attributions
- Licensing
Mobile Maia 2.5 brings appearance choices, board designs, clearer Maia help, optional score estimates, and more ways to set up and continue positions.
- Make the app your own. Choose Light, Dark or System default, Android system colors and an optional pure-black background. The original green/dark appearance remains the default.
- Choose your board. Pick from 25 boards and 16 approved piece sets, and control coordinates, legal-move dots, highlights, animation and dragging aids.
- Balanced new-install defaults. Play and primary analysis start at Maia 1500; the optional second analysis engine starts at 2600. Temperature 1.0 / Top-P 0.95 with opening variety on keeps the full opening repertoire for five moves. Existing choices and saved-game profiles are preserved.
- Understand Maia. One scrollable engine-help guide explains sampling, examples and research. An optional Maia score in Analysis Board and Game Review estimates expected game points, including half-point draws.
- Set up and continue positions. Use graphical editor palettes, move/erase tools and FEN copy/share. Continue an analysis position on screen or as an untimed Chessnut game with physical-position setup guidance.
- Explore variations more easily. Hold Left to return to a variation's main-line branch point; hold Right to go one main-line move beyond it. Navigation also clears stale selections and drag indicators.
2.5.1 fixes a crash when analyzing certain custom positions.
See the 2.5 release notes, 2.4 release notes and earlier release notes.
Active development continues in the separate Mobile Maia Preview repository. Its gold-icon app has a separate Android package and can be installed beside this stable blue-icon app.
The current 2.5 images below are actual Android captures of the Stable 2.5.0 app on 27 October 2026, visually checked before use. Appearance and optional engine examples identify their selected settings. Other dated images remain explicitly older illustrative examples. See capture provenance.
Stable 2.5.0 Home with its new-install defaults.
The home screen is the starting point for every workflow. Play as White, Black, or a random side; choose a preset or custom Play Maia rating; then start a game. Analysis Board opens a free-form position, Recent games restores saved work, and PGN files can be imported through Analysis Board or Android's Open with action. Your side, rating, clock, custom time values, and advanced settings are remembered locally.
Older illustrative capture; current labels and defaults are described in the text.
Games are unlimited by default. The quick controls follow Lichess's order:
1+0, 2+1, 3+0, 3+2, 5+0, 5+3, 10+0, 10+5, 15+10, 30+0, 30+20.
The first number is minutes per player; the second is seconds added after each
move. Custom minutes and increment are also available. Training clocks pause while the app is in the
background, while you review the current game, or after an engine error. Timed
PGNs use a standard TimeControl header and per-move [%clk ...] comments to
millisecond precision; unlimited games do not invent clock data.
Human move timing is optional and off by default. When enabled, Maia varies its pauses to give games a more natural rhythm. Shorter pauses are more common than longer ones. The configured time control selects the timing automatically:
| Time control | Average move-time target | Maximum target |
|---|---|---|
| 1+0 | About 1 second | 3 seconds |
| 2+1, 3+0, 3+2 | About 1.5 seconds | 4.5 seconds |
| 5+0 and longer presets; Unlimited | About 2 seconds | About 9 seconds |
The default draw is normally 0.55–4.5 seconds, with a 6% chance of an additional 1.5–4.5 seconds. Faster tiers scale that whole sample and then cap it. Matching Custom controls use the same faster tiers; other Custom controls keep the original distribution. These are random pauses, not a measure of position difficulty, and they do not shorten automatically when the remaining clock is low.
Calculation time counts toward the target. If the move is ready after 0.2 seconds and the target is 1.8 seconds, the app waits another 1.6 seconds. If calculation already takes 2.3 seconds, it adds no extra wait. Actual times can therefore exceed the target, and timed games can still end on the clock.
Open Settings → Language to follow the system or select English, 日本語, 简体中文, 한국어, Español, Deutsch, Français, Русский, हिन्दी or Português (Brasil). Languages are listed by their native names. Switching updates the interface without rewriting PGN notation, historical game data or engine values. Unsupported device languages fall back to English; Simplified Chinese is not silently substituted for a Traditional Chinese system preference.
Stable 2.5 Analysis Board in Light, default Dark and pure-black Dark modes. The Light and pure-black examples use Android system colors. Maia score display is off in these examples.
Open Settings → Appearance to choose Light, Dark or System default. Use system colors follows the Android palette on supported Android 12+ devices; it is unavailable on older devices. Pure black background applies in dark mode and retains its choice when you switch to light mode. The original green-accented Dark theme, without system colors or pure black, remains the default. Appearance and chessboard designs are separate choices.
Stable 2.5 board preferences and artwork selectors. Brown/Cburnett and the existing aids remain the defaults.
Open Settings → Board to choose from 25 boards and 16 approved piece sets, with a live preview. Adjust Board coordinates, Legal-move destinations, Last-move highlight, Piece animation and Magnify dragged piece independently. Dragged piece target offers Circle, Square or None. The preferences apply across play, analysis and applicable editor views and are remembered locally. Hiding the last-move highlight does not hide check, selection, premove or analysis overlays.
Stable 2.5 controls. The analysis example enables the optional second engine and score display for demonstration; both options are off by default.
Game groups premoves, the indented 100 ms premove charge and multiple-premove options, human move timing, Game sounds and Touch feedback. Engine groups Temperature, Top-P, opening variety, move history and sampling data. Analysis controls review ratings, the optional second Maia engine, score display and review quality. New preferences and a confirmed Settings reset use:
| Setting | Default |
|---|---|
| Play Maia rating | 1500 |
| Maia analysis rating | 1500 |
| Optional second Maia analysis rating | 2600; engine off |
| Temperature / Top-P | 1.0 / 0.95 |
| Max variety in opening | On |
| Game analysis quality | Fast |
| Move history / sampling capture / Maia score display | Off |
Existing explicit preferences and frozen saved-game sampling settings are preserved. Balanced and Thorough offer deeper Stockfish review searches. Copy diagnostics creates a privacy-safe local troubleshooting report and never uploads it automatically.
Maia predicts how often human players would choose each legal move. Temperature changes how strongly it favors the most likely moves; Top-P retains the highest-probability moves until their cumulative probability reaches the selected threshold. It is not a minimum probability for every individual move. At Temperature 0, Maia chooses its most likely move and Top-P is not used.
Open the information button beside Engine settings for one scrollable Temperature and Top-P guide, with plain-language examples, technical detail and a research link, available in all ten languages.
Stable 2.5 engine help, scrolled near the end.
The new default is Temperature 1.0 / Top-P 0.95 with Max variety in opening on. This keeps unfiltered opening choices, then excludes a small tail of unlikely moves from move 6. The selected rating remains a model input, rather than a guarantee of measured playing strength.
Our earlier 79M research at rating inputs of 1600 found approximately 64% e4, 25% d4 and 11% other first moves at 1.0/1.0. In a separate 1,200-game comparison, 1.0/0.95 gained about 71 Elo against 1.0/1.0, with 67 opening families rather than 85 in equal 2,000-opening samples. These are historical measurements, not a new strength claim for 2.5's combined opening override. Version 2.4 chose 1.0/1.0 throughout; 2.5 balances opening variety with later play through the override.
The older 0.5 / 0.9 settings came from our Maia2 and Maia3 local stacks, which used opening books. Mobile Maia has no opening book. See the visual report, results and reproducible data.
This switch uses Temperature 1.0 / Top-P 1.0 for the first five moves by each side, then your configured values from move 6. It is on for new preferences and Settings reset, alongside the new 1.0/0.95 defaults. It also works with Temperature 0: openings stay varied, then Maia chooses its most probable move from move 6. This does not guarantee a particular strength gain.
At configured 1.0/1.0 it is off and grayed out because there is nothing to override; its information button remains available. Returning both sliders to 1.0 clears the option. Existing preferences and saved-game profiles are not silently changed. Takebacks and Continue from here use the FEN's actual move number, rather than restarting the five-move allowance.
The idea was inspired by Maia3-tauri by outusuke. Mobile Maia's implementation and five-move cutoff are its own.
Use move history lets Maia consider up to seven previous positions alongside the current position. It remains off by default and off is recommended for now. In our 79M tests it improved human-move prediction by about 2 percentage points (from 57.00% to 59.36%), but sometimes encouraged repeated copying in low-rated openings; a playing-strength increase was not established. Saved games retain their recorded history setting. Read the research and limitations.
For players interested in how Maia works, Save Maia sampling data optionally records its settings, probabilities and chosen moves on the device. It is off by default and is separate from Recent games and diagnostics.
The last ten recorded games, including unfinished games, are saved and exported newest first. A 64 MiB safety limit can remove older captures sooner. Use the three-dot menu to Save… or Share…, then choose a readable offline HTML report or full JSONL research data. Reports show known players, results, openings, actual selection probabilities after Temperature/Top-P, plain-language odds and move arrows on a board. Captures cover Maia decisions, not every move in a complete PGN. Deleting captures asks for confirmation and does not delete saved games or previously exported files.
Settings groups Language, Appearance, Board, Game, Engine, Analysis and Chessnut options. Reset settings to default, above Copy diagnostics, asks for confirmation and keeps saved games and sampling data.
Older illustrative capture; current labels and defaults are described in the text.
Tap or drag pieces on the Lichess Chessground board. Maia-3 runs on-device and selects moves for the chosen rating instead of behaving like a deliberately weakened tactical engine. The live view shows both players, clocks, material imbalance, the move strip, turn status, and game controls. The screen stays awake during an active game, and the current position is checkpointed for recovery after process death, restart, or an app update.
Optional Game sounds distinguish moves, captures, invalid moves, and game end. Touch feedback adds touch cues for moves, checks, errors, and game end. Both run on the phone without a network connection. Phone feedback is suppressed while a Chessnut board controls the game; the separate Board sounds setting controls its own audible cues.
Older illustrative capture; current labels and defaults are described in the text.
Inspired by GM Aman Hambleton's
“Mona Lisa” checkmate,
this example queues a sixteen-move rook-and-queen plan. The strip is scrolled to
moves 13–16 and the projected board shows the signature finish: White's army
reset on its back rank with Qd1#. Mobile Maia previews only the player's
queued moves, not the opponent king's forced walk, so this is an homage rather
than a move-for-move reconstruction.
Queued pieces stay in their planned positions as each premove is played, while the remaining premove highlights shrink.
Enable Allow multiple premoves to plan up to 64 moves while Maia is thinking. After each Maia reply, only the next premove runs, and only if it is legal in the actual position; an illegal move cancels everything that follows. Cancel premoves clears the sequence immediately.
Premoves are available only for on-screen games. A separate setting can charge exactly 0.1 seconds for each executed premove before applying the normal increment. Without that setting, the default is one Lichess-style premove with no fixed deduction. Navigation, takebacks, leaving or restarting the game, and game completion all clear the queue.
Older illustrative capture; current labels and defaults are described in the text.
The bottom toolbar opens game actions, resigns, and moves backward or forward through played positions. Hold Back to jump to the starting position and hold Forward to return to the latest position. Historical positions are read-only; completed games also show the clock values belonging to the selected ply.
Takeback restores the playable board and clock while preserving the abandoned continuation as a PGN variation. In sufficiently reduced endgames, Offer draw asks for confirmation and lets local Stockfish decide whether Maia accepts. Accepted offers are saved as draws by agreement.
Older illustrative capture; current labels and defaults are described in the text.
Checkmate, stalemate, timeout, resignation, and agreed draws produce a result dialog. Open the finished position in Analysis Board, start a Rematch, or return Home. A completed game remains in Recent games when you choose New game; resetting an unfinished game uses a separate destructive confirmation.
Experimental Chessnut support has been confirmed with both Chessnut Go and Chessnut Air. It enters physical moves over Bluetooth and lights Maia's reply on the board. Mobile Maia compares the complete sensed position, treats temporary piece lifts and partial castling as unfinished, and lights mismatched squares when correction is needed. Optional board sounds distinguish check, checkmate, and a complete-looking illegal move.
Connect searches for recognized Chessnut boards. A single board connects automatically; multiple candidates open a chooser. Connection messages identify the board. The board's NEW GAME button opens the reset warning; a second press within 2.5 seconds confirms it. The game stays on screen, keeps the colors and waits for the LED-guided physical setup before starting again. The double-press NEW GAME Chessnut e-board behavior was inspired by MoveAPiece by egdels. DGT Pegasus and Square Off Grand Kingdom remain blocked in Stable pending separate acceptance.
Reconnect keeps the game and verifies the physical position before play continues. Pending Maia and takeback lights are restored. Play in app moves the same unfinished game to on-screen input while retaining its moves, variations, rating, and orientation. Board play supports untimed games from the standard starting position or a valid custom position through Continue from here. Set up the physical pieces to match the selected position before play begins; LEDs guide mismatched squares. The full FEN preserves whose turn it is, castling and en-passant rights. A connection can be reused, retried, cancelled or handed back to phone play. The requester reports that the Chessnut acceptance tests passed for this preparation; this is user-reported hardware acceptance, separate from automated emulator and controlled-transport checks. Other Chessnut models may use the same protocol but have not yet been confirmed; compatibility reports from their users are welcome. Timed board games, USB and direct physical editing/input in Analysis Board are not yet supported.
Stable 2.5 analysis with optional Maia 1500 and 2600 scores enabled.
Use Analysis Board to explore without starting a game. Stockfish supplies two evaluated lines and blue best-move arrows. Maia supplies the move a person at the configured rating is most likely to play; turn on the second Maia engine to compare two ratings and probabilities side by side. The screen can show all four lines together. When engines choose the same move, their arrows overlap or combine. The board, move tree, selected position, orientation, and engine context are restored across restarts.
Enable Settings → Analysis → Show Maia win (score) % to show a compact score beside the Analysis Board or Game Review title. It is off by default. Each line keeps its rating, white/black disc and percentage in fixed columns while results load or change. The disc identifies the side the number describes; flipping the board does not change that meaning. Tap the score for full labels and help, particularly on narrow screens where ratings may be hidden.
This is expected score, calculated as P(win) + ½ × P(draw), rather than
literal win probability. White 60% means roughly 60 expected points in 100
games, counting a win as one and a draw as half. Each engine uses its own
analysis rating for both players: M1500 means 1500 versus 1500, and M2600
means 2600 versus 2600. It is separate from move-choice percentages and
Stockfish evaluation. Equal rounded scores show = 50%, loading shows an
ellipsis, unavailable results a dash, and terminal positions the actual result.
How reliable is Maia’s score?
explains the research and its limits; the same link appears in score help.
Older illustrative capture; current labels and defaults are described in the text.
The fixed board sits above a scrollable, clickable move list. Select any move to inspect that position, use the arrows one ply at a time, or hold them to jump to the beginning or end when on the main line. Inside a side variation, hold Left returns to its outermost main-line branch point; hold Right selects one main-line move after that point, clamped at the game end. At a variation end the dimmed Right control cannot be tapped, but can still be held. Navigation clears a stale selected square, legal-move dots, held drag and promotion state so a fresh touch works immediately. The bundled Lichess CC0 opening dataset supplies offline ECO codes, detailed variation names, and transposition-aware matching. Long names remain on one line; an information button appears only when the name is truncated, opening the full name without pushing the engine panel down. Home returns directly from post-game analysis after the app resumes or restores its screen. Interactive Stockfish analysis first returns a quick result and then refines the same selected position.
Mobile Maia bundles Stockfish 19 Light through Lichess multistockfish 0.6.1. The move from the older Stockfish 16 integration followed a reproducible native crash when an engine was stopped and restarted. The package upgrade and per-engine handle lifecycle addressed that crash; choosing Light also keeps a small NNUE in the app so analysis and full-game review work immediately and entirely offline, without a separate download or setup. Bundling a full NNUE for everyone would increase the app's download and storage footprint. Light remains the default and offline fallback. An explicitly opt-in full Stockfish 19 NNUE is a separate proposal, subject to quality, device-performance, storage, file-integrity, privacy, reproducibility, and F-Droid checks (Preview issue #52).
The Analysis Board actions sheet loads FEN or PGN text, opens a PGN file, clears the move tree, opens Board Editor, or starts a Maia game from the selected position.
Stable 2.5 Board Editor and Position settings.
The editor has graphical piece palettes above and below the board. Select a piece to place it repeatedly; tap an identical piece to remove it. Use the hand tool to move existing pieces by tap or drag, or the erase tool to remove them. Flip changes the view and palette order. Position settings controls whose turn it is, four castling rights, en-passant target and FEN counters. The menu loads FEN, restores the starting position, clears the board or continues play. The share button offers Share FEN and Copy FEN. Analysis and Continue validate the position; incomplete drafts remain editable. Image import is labelled unavailable and is not a working feature.
Stable 2.5 captures: a custom phone clock and the emulator’s actual connection-unavailable recovery. The second image does not demonstrate a successful physical board connection.
Continue from here opens a one-game setup for your side, Play Maia rating and phone clock, including custom minutes and increment. Its choices start from Home preferences and do not overwrite them. Enable Use electronic board to connect to or reuse a Chessnut board; choose Set up board after connection. Board continuation is untimed and waits for the physical pieces to match the full selected position. Turning the option off restores the chosen phone clock. Cancel preserves analysis; Retry handles a failed connection. DGT Pegasus and Square Off Grand Kingdom are not enabled by this feature.
Older illustrative capture; current labels and defaults are described in the text.
The top menu saves or shares the complete annotated PGN, copies it to the clipboard, or copies the current FEN. Android's system picker and temporary URI grants are used, so storage and Internet permissions are not required.
Older illustrative capture; current labels and defaults are described in the text.
Select an earlier move and play a different continuation to create a clickable inline variation without deleting the original line. Long-press a move to collapse or expand its continuation, promote it one level, make it the main line, or delete from that point. Back navigation exits a variation at its branch point before continuing toward the start. Variations, comments, annotations, and takeback lines remain in exported PGN.
Older illustrative capture; current labels and defaults are described in the text.
From a completed or imported game, open Computer and run a full review. Stockfish analyses every main-line position locally using the selected Fast, Balanced, or Thorough preset. Progress is visible and cancellation is safe; there is no server-side quota.
Older illustrative capture; current labels and defaults are described in the text.
The completed review reports separate White and Black accuracy, move totals, and opening, middlegame, and endgame sections. Maia's likely human move remains available beside Stockfish at every reviewed position, using the configurable review rating (1500 for new preferences). Enable the second Maia engine to compare a second rating (2600 for new preferences) at the same position.
Older illustrative capture; current labels and defaults are described in the text.
The evaluation graph plots the game from White's perspective and marks classified moves. Tap anywhere on it to navigate directly to that position; the board, move highlight, evaluation bar, arrows, and current annotation stay in sync. The numeric evaluation remains at the advantaged side and follows the board when it is flipped.
Older illustrative capture; current labels and defaults are described in the text.
Review classifies moves as Brilliant, Good, Interesting, Dubious, Mistake, or Blunder, with separate totals for both players. Version 2.2 refines the classification heuristics so Brilliant moves are more likely to receive the correct label; these classification categories are not new. The screenshot shows Fischer's 17...Be6!! from the 1956 Byrne–Fischer game classified Brilliant by the signed Stable 2.2 app. The current classification appears on the board and in the move list. You can move pieces from any reviewed position to explore a branch without losing the original game.
Older illustrative capture; current labels and defaults are described in the text.
Recent games contains completed games and unfinished games explicitly saved
with Home. Each entry now identifies the player side and Maia rating (for
example, Player — Maia 1600) and shows the actual result (1-0, 0-1,
or 1/2-1/2) or Incomplete, plus the original played date. Opening or
analysing a record changes neither its date nor its chronological position.
Older records without a reliable played date show Date unknown.
Only the result text is coloured: green for the player's win, red for a loss,
amber for a draw and blue for incomplete. A 1-0 is therefore green if you
played White and red if you played Black; unknown results stay neutral.
It supports
multi-select, select all, selected deletion, and delete all. An unfinished
record becomes the same completed record when play ends.
Because Android can erase private app data on uninstall, use Save PGN file
or Share PGN for an independent copy.
Open PGN file, Android's Open with action, and shared attachments import one game with its variations, comments, and annotations. Files are limited to 2 MB and 20,000 moves across all branches; the first game is used when a document contains several games.
The app has no accounts, ads, subscriptions, tracking, or network dependency. The download is several hundred megabytes because it bundles the Maia-3 79M model so play and analysis stay on the device. The About screen shows the installed version, AGPL terms, warranty notice, source and licence links, and upstream credits.
Diagnostics are pruned to at most 14 days, 40 entries, 8,000 characters per entry, and 128,000 characters total. They may include app, Android, hardware, engine-cache, and privacy-safe Bluetooth state, but never a device serial, Bluetooth address or board name, chess position, or PGN.
No. I will not publish Mobile Maia on Google Play or develop an official iPhone version. This is a deliberate choice: in my view, Google's and Apple's tightly controlled app-distribution ecosystems are at odds with the philosophy of free and open-source software (FOSS), including the freedom to use, inspect, modify, and share it. I respect that others may make different choices; this is the approach I have chosen for Mobile Maia.
For context on the Android side, see F-Droid's An Open Letter Opposing Android Developer Verification.
Official Android downloads and update options are available through GitHub, F-Droid, Obtainium, and Zapstore, as described below.
A progressive web app (PWA) version is being developed at mobilemaia.org, offering a browser-based way to try Mobile Maia without an app-store installation. You can already play the browser edition with Maia-3 5M; it is not yet an installable or offline PWA.
Forks are welcome. Please honor the project's AGPL-3.0-only licence
and the applicable third-party licences documented in
THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md. If you fork Mobile Maia and
publish your version in an app store, please do everything possible to avoid
confusion with this project. Use a distinct app name, icon, and package or bundle
identifier, and clearly state in the app and its store listing that it is an
independent fork, who maintains it, and where users should go for support.
Do not present your fork as an official Mobile Maia release or imply that it
is affiliated with, endorsed by, or maintained by this project.
Mobile Maia is available from the official F-Droid repository. Install the F-Droid client, then search for Mobile Maia or open the Mobile Maia package page on your Android device. F-Droid can install the app and notify you when future updates are available.
The package page also provides a direct APK download for manual installation.
Obtainium installs Android apps directly from their official release pages and can notify you when updates are available.
-
Install Obtainium from its official releases page.
-
Open Obtainium, select Add App, and paste this URL into App Source URL:
https://github.com/Dash1971/maia-chess-android -
Confirm that Obtainium detects GitHub as the source. Leave Include prereleases disabled to receive stable versions only.
-
Select Add, open Mobile Maia in Obtainium, and select Install.
-
If Android asks, allow Obtainium to install unknown apps, then approve the Mobile Maia APK installation.
After setup, use Obtainium's update check to download and install future Mobile Maia releases. Android may ask you to confirm each update.
Mobile Maia has a developer-published Zapstore listing
for its signed Stable APK. Install the Zapstore client from its
official site, then open the Mobile Maia listing in the
client to install it and check for updates. A new GitHub release reaches this
channel only after the developer publishes and verifies it on Zapstore; the
repository's zapstore.yaml does not publish updates automatically. Maintainers
should follow the Zapstore post-release step.
- Stable bugs: Search or open an issue in this repository.
- Preview bugs and feature requests: Search or open an issue in the Preview repository.
Check existing issues before opening a new one. For bug reports, include the app version and channel, Android version and device, steps to reproduce, and what you expected to happen. A small PGN/FEN example or diagnostics can help when relevant.
Code, documentation, translations, and testing contributions are welcome. Discuss substantial changes in a Preview issue before starting, so the approach and scope can be agreed. New features are developed and tested in Preview before promotion to Stable. Use the pinned toolchain and follow the testing guide. Contributions are accepted under the project's licence.
Requirements: Flutter 3.47.5 (pinned in .fvmrc), JDK 17, Android SDK 36,
Python 3, and Git LFS. Use the locked dependencies. A GitHub source ZIP contains
an LFS pointer rather than the 316 MB Maia model, so clone with Git LFS:
git clone https://github.com/Dash1971/maia-chess-android.git
cd maia-chess-android
git lfs install
git lfs pull
python3 tool/verify_model.py
flutter pub get --enforce-lockfile
flutter analyze
flutter test
tool/build_android_release.shThe APK is written to build/app/outputs/flutter-apk/app-release.apk. The build
script verifies the bundled model's size and SHA-256 before building.
Further documentation:
- Reproducible builds: build environment and independent APK comparison.
- Testing guide: additional regression tests.
- Release procedure and release verification: signing, qualification, and publication.
The official signing certificate SHA-256 digest is:
cd6c07c4efacf52bcccb83009b522c1dcad4a171197505a486f0a58edb6f172e
The checked-in ONNX model was exported from the official Maia-3 79M checkpoint. The exporter verifies ONNX Runtime outputs against PyTorch before succeeding.
python -m pip install /path/to/maia3 onnx onnxruntime
python tool/export_maia3_onnx.py --model maia3-79m --output assets/models/maia3-79m.onnxMobile Maia uses the Maia-3 project and its 79M model. Maia-3 was created by the University of Toronto Computational Social Science Lab to model human chess move choices at different rating levels.
The board interface is provided by
Lichess Flutter Chessground,
including the default Lichess brown theme and Cburnett pieces. Local Stockfish
support uses
Lichess multistockfish.
Opening names and ECO codes come from the CC0
Lichess chess-openings dataset,
pinned to the source revision recorded in
THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md. Analysis Board interactions
are also informed by the open-source
Lichess Mobile analysis experience.
Mobile Maia is independently implemented and is not affiliated with Lichess.
Experimental Chessnut support uses Chessnut's
published e-board API and
MIT-licensed EasyLinkSDK, and was
cross-checked against Roberto Marabini's GPL-3.0
chessnutair reference
implementation. Mobile Maia's Bluetooth transport uses Android's native BLE
APIs. Protocol sources, copyright notices, licence terms, and adaptation
details are recorded in THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.
Game Review's move-classification and sacrifice-detection heuristics are
adapted and translated to Dart from
En Croissant, the
open-source chess GUI by Francisco Salgueiro and contributors. The pinned
upstream revision and licence details are recorded in
THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.
The double-press NEW GAME Chessnut e-board behavior was inspired by MoveAPiece by egdels.
The Max variety in opening idea is credited to Maia3-tauri by outusuke. This is an idea attribution; no Maia3-tauri source code is incorporated for this feature.
Copyright (c) 2026 Dash. Original application code in this repository is
licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 only
(AGPL-3.0-only). Contributions are accepted under the same licence.
Mobile Maia as a combined application is distributed under AGPL-3.0-only.
Individual third-party components retain their respective copyright notices
and licences, notably Maia-3 (AGPL-3.0), Stockfish/multistockfish (GPL-3.0),
dartchess (GPL-3.0), and adapted En Croissant code (GPL-3.0). See
THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.
This is an independent community project and is not an official Maia Chess, University of Toronto CSSLab, Stockfish, Lichess, or En Croissant application.