PUZZMO IS GETTING A NATIVE IOS APP MONDAY by John Gruber for Daring Fireball

"My suggestion is check them out now, see how you like it as a web app on your iPhone, and then compare when the app hits the App Store on Monday. Puzzmo is a really good web app. I bet, though, the app is better."

This has been living in my head, as the kids say, rent free since I read Gruber's post. I was on Puzzmo at "Day One."1 I love Zach's games and their design. I like what Puzzmo was doing. It got me to actually do crossword puzzles for a spell. Just two months after launch, Puzzmo was bought by Hearst Newspapers as a part of the Newspaper Game Wars of the 20s.

I fell off after awhile, sticking with Good Sudoku and Knotwords before falling off those too. One of the reasons I dropped Puzzmo at large before the likes of the other two, despite Puzzmo having some of Zach's games inside it was the lack of a native iOS app. Sometimes you just want that native feel, you know?

So when I saw Gruber's post about the native apps impending arrival, I tapped the little "pre-order" button and waited for Monday.

Monday came and my excitement went. It's just a web view in an app wrapper. I actually couldn't believe it given Zach's pedigree. If I had followed Puzzmo app news more closely though, I wouldn't have been surprised by this news.

"The iOS app is going to be a hybrid web-view app, with native Swift code to handle a lot of the Apple integrations. This means that it will feel like a full-screen version of the website in Safari, but with the ability to pay via the App Store and we’ll use native features when it makes sense."

I knew the app was not what I expected when I saw this on the home page.2

I'm in the app. Why am I seeing an ad for the app inside the app?

Then you open the crossword and are met with this view.

Compare that to the view in Knotwords on a Sunday puzzle.

When you zoom in (as of May 26, 2025), these artifacts linger and tear the screen.

250524a_Puzzmo Tear 250524b_Puzzmo Tear

Sure, the tears are bugs that can be resolved, but really? This is the state you launch your "native" app in? Given the view is so zoomed out, you have to zoom in to read and play the puzzle. The tears will happen. It's an immediate break in the experience.

Of course, in the unpaid tier, you also have ads, which strike me as the cheapo kind. It's no Taboola ad, but it certainly feels like a web ad.

I hate to say it, but the Puzzmo app is not a good experience. It is a real shame that Zach and team launched it in this state. What makes the shame heavier is that Zach is a superb designer. I know he works with excellent designers too. The team has fallen short in an off-putting way.

Thankfully, Gruber is not a betting man.

Footnotes

  1. When Puzzmo launched, the only way in was to solve a puzzle online, give then your address, then they'd send you a puzzle in the mail, solve that puzzle, and then you'd get a login for the full site. So what does "Day One" mean when the system is like that? ↩

  2. Image very tall, please hover to see. 😅 ↩