What “no ads, no signup” actually means in a puzzle app

“No ads, no signup” is printed on a great many store listings and means four different things depending on who wrote it. Here are the four questions that actually separate them, and Puzzle Lantern’s answers to each, including the one where the answer is that it costs money.

Question 1: how does it make money?

Every app makes money somehow, and the model decides what the app does to you. There are only five, and it is worth being able to name them:

The third row is the one to watch in puzzle apps specifically. If hints are sold individually, the person setting the difficulty and the person setting the hint price are working for the same outcome, and it is not your outcome.

Puzzle Lantern’s answer

Subscription, and the bad news first: it is not free.

• A new installation plays free for seven days, with no card, no account and no store interaction at all. The window opens by itself on first launch.
• After that it needs a subscription.
• Installations dating from before the first paid release are free permanently. Early players are not asked to pay for what they already had.
• There are no ads, no banners, no interstitials, no rewarded video, and no advertising identifiers.
• Hints are not sold. In Sudoku they are part of the game and they cost you rank, not money: a grid completed with hints is ordered below one completed without.

There is no free tier beyond the first week. If a permanently free app is what you are after, this is the point to stop reading, and the Sudoku and daily-game alternatives in our alternatives guide are a better use of your time.

Question 2: what does “no signup” mean here?

Three different things travel under that phrase, and only one of them is what people want:

• No account at all. Nothing is stored anywhere. Lose the phone, lose everything.
• No signup screen, account made for you. You start playing immediately and there is still something for a streak and a leaderboard to hang on.
• “Sign in with Apple only”. Still a signup. It is a good one, but it is not no signup.

Puzzle Lantern’s answer

The second. Open the app and the first puzzle is there. An account is created for you with a generated username, so your streak, your statistics and your friends stay with you. No email address, no password and no first-run funnel.

The catch, stated plainly: passwordless email recovery has not been built yet. Until it is, an account cannot move to a new device and does not survive deleting the app. If you want to be able to carry twelve months of results to a new phone today, no signup is the wrong trade and you should pick an app that asks you to sign in.

Question 3: what does it ask for?

The permission prompt on first launch tells you more about an app than its store listing does. A puzzle game asking for contacts is asking for a social graph it intends to do something with.

Puzzle Lantern’s answer

Nothing is requested on first launch: no contacts, no notifications, no tracking prompt. Contacts, precise location, photos, microphone and health data are never requested at all. Notifications come up only if you switch on the optional daily reminder yourself.

Friends work without any of that. There are two ways in and both need the other person to accept: an invite link, or a request to an exact username. There is no search and no autocomplete, so typing a username tells you nothing, because the answer looks identical whether or not the account exists. There are no friend codes and no contact syncing. The full design is written up here.

On this website, analytics is opt-in. Nothing is requested from Google until somebody presses Accept, the choice is kept in local storage rather than a cookie, so declining sets no cookie at all, and a browser sending Global Privacy Control is treated as a decline and never sees the banner.

Question 4: does it work offline?

Most daily puzzle apps need the network to fetch the day’s puzzle and to post a result. The useful question is what happens mid-solve when the train goes into a tunnel.

Puzzle Lantern’s answer

Play works locally while the device is offline, and the account syncs when connectivity comes back. More puzzles progress and history, and settings such as sound, haptics and reminders, are stored on the device and are not uploaded to the gameplay servers at all.

The one genuine gap: the very first launch of a fresh install with no network cannot establish access, because there has been no successful check to fall back on. An existing subscriber opening the app offline keeps the access their last successful check found.

Ask how it makes money first. Everything else about how an app behaves follows from the answer.

The summary, in one table

Questions people ask

Does Puzzle Lantern show ads?

No. No banners, no interstitials, no rewarded video, and no advertising identifiers tracking you across apps and websites.

Is Puzzle Lantern free?

Seven days free on a new installation with no card and no account, then a subscription. Installations from before the first paid release stay free permanently.

Do I need an account to play?

No signup form and no password. An account is generated for you on first launch so your streak, statistics and friends persist.

What permissions does the app ask for?

None on first launch. Contacts, precise location, photos, microphone and health data are never requested.

Can I play offline?

Yes, and the account syncs when you are back online. The exception is the first launch of a fresh install with no network.