How does one create a Stockfish 17 UCI compliant engine for Android GUIs to recognize and be capable of installing? (for ARM v8)

[Flashlight002]

Hi all. I am not a coder. I am a user. In the past I have been able, from time to time, to find a compiled engine available on the Playstore. So, when one loaded this engine app one was able to see a UCI enabled Stockfish engine available on one's cellphone for loading in the installed Android GUI. There is no new compiled engine for Stockfish 17 on the Google Playstore as at 30/1/2025. There is one for 15.1. Can someone reply to this post with a detailed explanation on how to compile such an engine app for Stockfish 17 (or supply a link to such a resource), and how to load it onto one's cellphone. Instructions should be clear enough to be followed by a "non-coder". Given that our cellphones are now being used for just about everything, and where flagship models are as powerful as laptops, it seems ludicrous that there isn't always an up-to-date app available on Playstore that enables the most up to date UCI compliant Stockfish engine to be loaded on Android GUIs.
(Why doesn't the dev team of Stockfish publish a mobile UCI compliant engine on Playstore when there is a major update to the engine? In this way everyone round the world will have immediate access to the mobile verson of the engine, and we won't have to struggle trying to reinvent the wheel all the time - especially for people who are not computer scientists or coders! The process of loading a Windows engine is painless, why is it such a mission for mobile? )

[ppigazzini]

Easier to get help in the Discord channel
https://discord.gg/awnh2qZfTT

Read the wiki https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/wiki/Download-and-usage#official-downloads
You can download the binary from the official site, check the archive for armv8 or armv8-dotprod if you have a recent smartphone.
https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/releases/tag/sf_17

Then you can extract and move the engine in the folder expected by your GUI, eg the "uci" folder for Droidfish
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.petero.droidfish/

EDIT:
Droidfish should already ships Stockfish 16.1
https://github.com/peterosterlund2/droidfish/tree/master/DroidFishApp/src/main/cpp/stockfish

[ppigazzini]

https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/releases

Here you find the binaries for the latest development Stockfish, a little stronger than version 17.

[Flashlight002]

As far as "extracting the binary"....am I looking for the apk file in the tar archive?

[ppigazzini]

Crosspost.
The archive contains, the engine binary, the src code, the license and other files. You can keep simply the engine binary.

ls -la
total 78160
drwxr-xr-x 4 usr00 usr00     4096 Sep  6 18:37  .
drwxr-xr-x 3 usr00 usr00     4096 Jan 31 00:08  ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 usr00 usr00     5788 Sep  6 18:37  AUTHORS
-rw-r--r-- 1 usr00 usr00      704 Sep  6 18:37  CITATION.cff
-rw-r--r-- 1 usr00 usr00     3768 Sep  6 18:37  CONTRIBUTING.md
-rw-r--r-- 1 usr00 usr00    35149 Sep  6 18:37  Copying.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 usr00 usr00     7439 Sep  6 18:37  README.md
-rw-r--r-- 1 usr00 usr00    20045 Sep  6 18:37 'Top CPU Contributors.txt'
drwxr-xr-x 5 usr00 usr00     4096 Sep  6 18:37  src
-rwxr-xr-x 1 usr00 usr00 79934680 Sep  6 18:37  stockfish-android-armv8-dotprod        <---- this is the engine binary
drwxr-xr-x 2 usr00 usr00     4096 Sep  6 18:37  wiki

I use termux and you talked about a "command prompt"
https://termux.dev/en/

[ppigazzini]

As far as "extracting the binary"....am I looking for the apk file in the tar archive?

https://www.wikihow.com/Open-a-Tar-File-on-Android

[ppigazzini]

Another way is to extract the tar archive on Windows with 7-zip, upload the engine binary on your Google Drive and download it in your smarphone.