Tilt for iOS · last changed 30 August 2026
Tilt keeps your games on your phone. It signs in to Lichess to read the games you have finished, runs its chess engine on the device, and sends me one thing: a random number saying that this copy of the app was opened today. There is no advertising and no tracking, and nothing that leaves your phone could be traced back to you.
Connect Lichess opens Lichess's own sign-in page. The app never sees your password. Lichess hands the app a token that lets it read your games and hear when a game of yours starts or finishes, and that token is kept in your phone's keychain. Disconnecting in Settings revokes it at Lichess and removes the games from the phone.
With that token the app asks lichess.org for your finished rated games, and while it is on screen it keeps a connection open so it hears a game start or end. It asks for nothing about a game in progress and shows no engine output until a game is over.
If you add a chess.com username, the app asks chess.com's public API for that account's public game archives, the same pages anyone can open in a browser. No sign-in and no password.
Everything after that happens on your phone: working out how well you played, grouping games into sessions, and running the chess engine over them. Nothing is uploaded to be processed.
All of it stays in the app's own storage on your phone:
Of these, only the installation identifier ever leaves the phone, and only in the once-a-day message described below. Your games and your names go nowhere but to Lichess and chess.com, as the requests that fetch them.
Deleting the app removes all of it. Disconnecting Lichess, or stopping chess.com, inside the app clears that account's games too.
Once a day, if you have left it switched on, the app sends two things: the random installation number from your phone's keychain, and the app's version. That is the entire message. It tells me how many people use Tilt and whether they keep using it, which is the only way I can tell whether carrying on with it is worth anybody's time.
It cannot be traced to you. The installation number is random and was never made from your Lichess or chess.com name, so there is nothing in it to work backwards from. The file these go into holds three things, a date, that random number, and a version, and nothing on that side has ever been told a username.
Settings → about → Say the app was opened turns it off.
Tilt contains no analytics library, no advertising library, no crash reporting service and no tracking of any kind. It has no advertising identifier and asks for no permissions.
It talks to Lichess to read your games with the token you granted, and to chess.com if you add a name there; what each does with those requests is covered by Lichess's privacy policy and chess.com's. It sends the daily message to a server of mine hosted by Fly.io in Sydney, and asks the same server which features are switched on, which carries nothing about you and is not recorded. Apple provides the App Store.
Tilt is not directed at children under 13 and does not knowingly collect anything from them.
If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it.
Chess piece artwork by Colin M.L. Burnett, used under CC BY-SA 3.0.