Firenzina: Porting a Chess Engine to Android

We have ported an open-source chess engine to Android using the Native Development Kit (NDK), tested it against other engines, and played against it ourselves. The porting process revealed a number of challenges and insights, some of which may be similar across other mobile application ports, while others are likely unique to chess. We found that few changes were needed to have a working engine, and that the architecture of chess engines based on the universal chess interface (UCI) protocol enabled quick adoption of an advanced user interface. We also found that the native development experience made it difficult to find the path to a complete solution requiring relatively minor changes. In this paper, we present our solutions, along with observations about the porting process in the context of the UCI-based chess engine architecture. We believe that these observations will be of interest to developers of other applications as well.