Apple / games / EASY SUDOKU CLASSIC OFFLINE
REVIEW
Easy Sudoku Classic Offline keeps the genre stripped to the wood.
An indie iPhone, iPad, Mac and Vision Pro sudoku app that asks for nothing — no account, no network, no in-app purchase — and largely earns the trust that asks for.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 11, 2026 · 3 MIN READ
Easy Sudoku Classic Offline
ANDREY SOKOLOVSKIY
OUR SCORE
6.9
APPLE
★ 5.0
PRICE
Free
The free sudoku category on iOS is one of the most cynical corners of the App Store. The chart leaders monetise per-puzzle: a fifteen-second video before the timer starts, a banner squatting along the bottom rail, and a subscription dialog that shows up the moment you try to switch difficulty. Easy Sudoku Classic Offline opts out of the whole machinery.
It is a free app from a single developer in eastern Europe that does exactly what its name says — a sudoku grid, a number pad, and an offline button that means it. No account to create, no telemetry prompt to dismiss, no rewarded-ad button winking from the corner of the toolbar. For the genre, that restraint is the entire pitch.
The catch is that restraint cuts both ways. There’s no daily puzzle, no friends list, no published roadmap, and the rating average that looks like a verdict — five stars flat — is anchored to two reviews on the U.S. store. What’s here is good. There just isn’t very much of it yet.
The five-star rating sits on two reviews, and the app feels like it: small, careful, and almost entirely unmarketed.
FEATURES
The board is a board. Tap a cell, tap a number, optionally toggle Notes mode to drop up to nine candidates inside one square. Three hints per puzzle, an erase button, unlimited undo, and a Strict toggle that ends the run at three mistakes or lets you grind through every wrong tap until the grid is full.
There are no daily challenges, no leagues, no avatars, no streak meters, no push notifications begging you back. The competitive framing in the App Store description ("solve faster than your opponents") is aspirational — what shipped is single-player against a timer.
Version 3.2 runs on iOS 15 and up, iPad, Apple Silicon Macs, and Vision Pro from a single binary. The app is 130 MB on disk, plays fully offline, and localises into a dozen languages including Russian, Spanish, French, and German. There are no in-app purchases listed.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The pricing is the headline: free, no purchases, no subscription tier dangling behind a paywall. That is rare in the sudoku category on iOS, where the top of the charts is occupied by apps that gate the harder boards behind a $4.99-a-week trial and pad the rest with full-screen video ads between puzzles.
The second win is restraint. The interface is one screen, the controls are where your thumb expects them, and the developer resisted the urge to bolt on coin economies, themes shop, or a "daily reward" loop. For anyone who installed a sudoku app last year and uninstalled it within a week, this is a credible second attempt.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
The five-star rating sits on two reviews, and the app feels like it: small, careful, and almost entirely unmarketed. There is no public changelog of substance, no website to point at, and no track record long enough to know whether updates will continue past version 3.2.
Difficulty is opaque. The store copy doesn't enumerate levels, and the in-app selector offers presets without explaining how the puzzles are generated or whether each grid has a unique solution — a basic guarantee that better-resourced sudoku apps surface up front. Statistics are minimal, there's no streak history worth tracking across devices, and iCloud sync of in-progress games isn't advertised.
CONCLUSION
Install this if you want a sudoku app that loads, plays, and gets out of the way — particularly if the alternative on your home screen is one of the ad-saturated free tier offenders. Look elsewhere if you care about leaderboards, daily puzzles you can compare with friends, or a developer with a multi-year track record. The next thing to watch for is whether version 3.3 ever ships.