Solar Puzzles 1.7: one library for every game
solarpuzzlesreleaseengineering
Solar Puzzles 1.7 is out on the App Store and Google Play. No game changed its rules. What changed is the building they live in: a new home screen, a new way to get around, and a museum that finally fits on a phone.
What’s new
- A game library. Every game is a card in a grid — two columns on a phone, three on an iPad. Pin your favourites and they come first, newest pin first.
- Continue takes you straight back to the last game you actually played, at the next level it has for you.
- Games, Museum and My space sit side by side along the bottom, and switching between them slides the pages across in that order. On iOS 26 the bar is Apple’s own Liquid Glass.
- The Space Museum sorts its treasures onto four shelves — Planets, Dwarfs, Artifacts and Deep Space — on one strip across the top, with a red dot where there is something new to look at.
- My space gathers your profile, your collection, the Space Pass and Settings, and ends with Rate Us: a thumbs-up for the store’s review page, a thumbs-down for a short form that tells us what to fix.
- The grown-up check asks for a year of birth instead of a multiplication.
- A lighter app. Less than half its old size on both platforms, and faster to start on Android.
A library instead of a list
The home screen used to be a stack of tall cards, one per game, with the museum at the bottom. It was built when there were fewer games. With five, the stack had become a long scroll that hid the museum below the fold and gave every game the same weight, whether you played it every day or never. The library is a grid of smaller cards, two to a row on a phone, and it lets you rank them: a pinned game moves to Favorites at the top, the newest pin first.
Continue is the card above them, and it is more careful than it looks. It records a game only when you actually reach a board — opening a level list and backing out does not count. It opens the next level you have not cleared, or the list when you have cleared them all; it asks for a heart like any other card; and it checks the Space Pass each time, so a pass that has run out never leaves a shortcut into a game you can no longer open. It does not bring back a board in progress: Solar Puzzles has never saved a half-played puzzle, and a shortcut that pretended to would be the one thing on the screen that lied.
Tabs that slide, and a tap that never waits
The three tabs lie side by side in the order of their buttons, so switching is a pan: the page to the right comes in from the right and the one it replaces leaves to the left. The sky and the header stay put, so it reads as the camera moving along one strip rather than a new screen arriving.
On iOS 26 the bar is SwiftUI’s native tab view, which draws Apple’s Liquid Glass and switches pages instantly, with no transition to configure. Underneath it is a UITabBarController, and that does take a custom animation through its delegate — so the app puts a small delegate in front of SwiftUI’s own that answers the one question about transitions and passes everything else through. The first version had a flaw you could only feel. UIKit ignores every touch while a transition is running, and a spring that settles gently takes about 0.6 seconds, so a second tap during the pan simply vanished; three quick taps felt like a bar that had frozen. The fix was to finish the system’s transition at once and play the pan ourselves, with a snapshot of the page that is leaving. The new page is selected and touchable from the first frame, and a tap in the middle of a pan starts the next one from wherever the pages are.
A swipe between the tabs was built too, with the pages following the finger, and taken out again the same day once it was tried on a real phone. It did not feel right, and a gesture that works most of the time is worse than none.
Four shelves on one strip
The museum’s four shelves were four separate pills, and on an iPhone they did not fit: the last one ran off the edge and the row scrolled. They now sit in one capsule across the screen, the way Telegram lays out its chat folders — four equal segments and a lighter pill that slides to the open one. The count of new discoveries became a small red dot at the top right of the name, because a number beside “Deep Space” is exactly what pushed it off the edge. On the narrowest iPhone layout the name gets slightly smaller instead; it is never cut short.
A year instead of a sum
Every purchase and every link out of the app sits behind a grown-up check, as Apple requires of an app in the Kids category. Ours was a two-digit multiplication. It worked, but it made an adult buying something for themselves do homework, and it bought no real safety: a child with an older sibling or a calculator gets through any sum we could set. A gate like this is a speed bump, not a lock.
So it now asks for a year of birth. An adult types their own without thinking; the gate opens the moment the fourth digit lands if the person is between 18 and 100, and there is no Continue button to find. Any other year simply clears the cells, with no hint of which way to go. The year is never stored or sent anywhere: a Kids app may ask for a birth date only to comply with privacy law, and a gate that kept it would be collecting an age. The store’s own confirmation — Face ID, Ask to Buy — still stands behind it. The trade is a known one: a sum was new every time, while a year is a key that stays. That is the determined child the gate never claimed to stop.
Rate Us, and where it leads
My space ends with a question, “Do you like the game?”, and two buttons. The thumbs-up opens the store’s own page for writing a review; the thumbs-down opens a short form — a rating, one comment and the app version — in the system browser. Both are pages outside the game, so both sit behind the grown-up check, which says so in its own words when it stands in front of a link rather than a purchase. The app fills in the version line of the form and nothing else, and sends nothing itself. The privacy policy describes both links.
Less to download, less to draw
The game art is painted at 1254 pixels and drawn on screen at a tenth of that. Both apps now ship every sprite at 512 pixels, made by a build step from the untouched originals, and nothing changed that a side-by-side comparison could find. The Android download went from 51 to 21 MB and the iOS app from 86 to 40 MB, and a Cosmic Marbles screen on a mid-range Android phone uses a third less memory.
Android also learned to stop redrawing things that are not moving. The home screen’s drifting sky used to make the phone repaint every card on top of it sixty times a second; the cards are now kept as ready-made textures, and on our Android 11 test phone the idle home screen went from missing 17–22 per cent of its frames to 6–10. Slow decorations — a twinkling sky, a turning marble in a style card — move thirty times a second instead of sixty, which took the busiest level list from missing almost half its frames to almost none. The app now ships a Baseline Profile, so Android compiles the code every game runs at install time instead of while you play; a cold start went from 427 to 392 ms. And one crash is gone: on Android the Space Pass screen could close the app if it was the very first screen drawn, because the store’s answer arrived on a thread of its own mid-draw.
Get Solar Puzzles — free to play, no ads, nothing collected, every puzzle offline. On both stores.
