The bot in your pocket
Our Lichess bot @clrsrc_lc0 plays around the clock – but who wants to keep the live page open in a browser just to not miss a game? So there is now a small Android app: it shows the running game live and tells you on its own as soon as a new game starts or one finishes. Open source on GitHub, with the APK to download directly.
What the app does
- Live board. The running game of
clrsrc_lc0in real time – moves as they happen, the last move highlighted, both clocks and the detected opening. - Background watcher. A service keeps watching the bot even when the app is closed and sends a notification the moment a new game starts or a game ends (with the result).
- Survives a reboot. The watcher comes back on its own after a device restart if it was active before.
- Freely configurable. By default the app follows
clrsrc_lc0, but the watched bot can be changed at any time – it works with any Lichess bot.
How it works
The app uses only the public Lichess API – no login, no OAuth, no credentials. It polls for the current game every 15 seconds, reads its positions from Lichess's live data stream (move by move) and fetches the result at the end. The background watcher runs as a foreground service with a persistent, quiet status notification – that is how Android is kept from killing it.
Installing
Download the APK from the GitHub releases and tap it on your phone. Because the app does not come from the Play Store, you need to allow installation from unknown sources once; the APK is signed with the debug key. It requires Android 8.0 or newer.
All the source code is open on GitHub – like the engine and the bot: github.com/clrsrc/clrsrc-bot-app ↗ (GPL-3.0). You can still watch the bot playing on the live page.