The home screen is rewritten. One flow — today's puzzles, the games you are playing, and all eight — with no segments and no filter chips. Every daily card now wears its own game's colour. The fourth tab is you. Your streak, what you have solved, and where you are in each game; settings behind the gear. Duels. You can challenge a friend straight from the home screen now, and you decide when you send it whether help is allowed — choose None and hints, reveals and checks are off for both of you. A pure race. You can nudge someone once, then not again for twelve hours. The result screen no longer waits on the server, and it says what the score actually means. Friends is one page: everything about a person under one heading, with requests in and out folded beneath it. Every game has its own symbol — the same face from the launch screen to the daily cards. The leaderboard has a podium for the first three. Notifications arrive in three piles — reminders, announcements, social — and there is an inbox for them inside the app. You can choose a username and link your account, so your progress no longer belongs to one phone. Speed. Typing no longer redraws the keyboard and the board on every key. Going back to a screen no longer reloads it. And when the app opens, it arrives whole rather than in instalments. In Kare's daily, filling the grid turns the wrong squares red by itself — free, exactly as it works in the levels. The daily cap on earning keys from an ad is gone, and when the ad finishes it carries on with whatever you were doing. And the bug where two cards landing together froze the screen is fixed at the root.

Two new games. In Halat you build your own route between two words — one letter changes each step, and how many steps you spend is up to you. In Aralık you squeeze a hidden word between an upper and a lower bound; every guess moves one of them, and the keyboard closes down with the range. Both come with a daily puzzle and a full run of levels, in English and Turkish. Every "how to play" has been rewritten. Instead of four rules over four unrelated pictures, it walks a single board one move at a time. Echo most of all — that is the one people were getting stuck on. In Dokuz, a box lights up and locks the moment it is finished and correct. If it is wrong it does not lock, so a mistake no longer stays silent until the end. The crossword's daily marks your mistakes the way a level does — free, automatic, on the same Show mistakes setting. It did not work before. Duels moved above the daily puzzles on the home screen, and search to the top of Friends. The word meanings after a solve now fold up behind a Dictionary button. A duel you finished always scores now; the case where both players came away with zero is gone. And an achievement for winning a duel or adding a friend arrives when it happens, not after your next puzzle.

Sudoku now comes in easy and medium too. A 6×6 grid, digits 1 to 6 — the right place to start if you have never finished one. The full 9×9 boards are still there; they are just no longer the only option. And the sudoku board is finally readable: your digits look different from the printed ones, a wrong digit turns red and shows you what it clashes with, and your row and column light up. Crossword boards open at a size that fits the screen — no more zooming out first — and the word you are typing is easy to pick out. Word Hunt shows the letters under your finger above the grid, where you can read them. In a duel, you pick the sudoku difficulty. Send your friend a board they can actually finish. Small things: the game no longer freezes if you leave during an ad, screenshots work on a puzzle again, and the keys along the bottom stop running into the edge of the screen. All three came from you.

Every board gives the puzzle the whole screen now — the headings and counters above it are gone. Tandem shows you which letters the square is built from, so there is somewhere to start. Achievements have a page of their own, and the rewards are yours to collect. Plus: ads no longer hold up the next puzzle, and Turkish word hunts stay in the Turkish alphabet.

• Kare now uses the whole screen: the title, the entry counter and the zoom bar are gone, so the grid gets the room. Pinch to zoom. • In Kare, the clue arrows walk the across and down lists in order, so it is easy to follow where you are. • The keyboard no longer closes by itself while you are solving. • Small improvements and bug fixes.

A change under the hood: the timing of the ads between levels has been reset. If you would rather play without them, "Remove Ads" is still in the Store.

A few issues fixed. Probably a few new ones added; let us know if you find any.

An Echo fix: in the daily, a wrong row no longer moves you on to the next one. We point at the mistake where you make it, not three rows later. Hints also stopped charging you for a square you had already placed correctly. Happy solving.

Race a friend on the very same puzzle: send a duel, and whoever solves it better takes the pot. You pick the keyboard now — your phone's, or the app's own keys. Plus a lot of polish: clearer screens, fewer snags.

Kare • A new button to see the whole puzzle at once. Zoom out for the full board; tap a square to travel there and open its clue. • On boards that are not square the last row was never drawn, and there was no way to scroll to it. • On boards that are not square the clue bar showed the clue for a different answer than the one the cursor was in.