Mind Craft Fish runs on iPhone, iPad and Mac. It is one app and one purchase — download it on any of them and it is there on the others, at no extra cost, with progress syncing if you use a parent account.
Requirements are iOS or iPadOS 13 and later, or macOS 10.15 and later. The Mac version is a real Mac build, not a phone app in a window, and it runs on Intel Macs as well as Apple silicon.
If you have a choice, use an iPad or a Mac. We would rather say that here than have you form an opinion from ten minutes on a phone.
The one thing to know about iPhone
On iPhone and iPad the app is locked to landscape. That is the right call on a tablet — the aquarium is a wide scene and the interface is built around it. On a phone it means the whole app lives on a short, wide strip, which is a genuinely small canvas for something with this much on screen.
Nothing is broken and nothing is missing. It is just tighter everywhere, and a few activities feel the squeeze more than others.
What actually suffers on a small screen
- Coding. Instruction blocks are dragged into a sequence, and you want to see the whole program and the sea at the same time. On a phone you are scrolling to check what you built.
- Character craft. Tracing kanji and Chinese characters with a fingertip needs room. Stroke order is hard to follow when the finger covers the character.
- Light & Shadow. The whole puzzle is about noticing how a shape and its shadow relate. Small means squinting.
- The aquarium. Fish swim at different depths, and the sense of a place with distance in it is most of the reward. A phone flattens it.
- The voyage map. It scrolls vertically down a long sea chart, so a short screen shows less of the journey at once.
What the phone is genuinely good for
Arithmetic, Stroop, number hunt, memory and rhythm are all fine on a phone. They are big-target, short-round games, and they are exactly the ones you want in a waiting room or the back of a car.
The tank timer works well too — it is meant to be glanced at, not studied.
A realistic pattern is iPad at home for the sit-down sessions and iPhone for the ten spare minutes somewhere else. With a parent account both stay in sync.
And on a Mac
The Mac build is a normal windowed Mac app, so it gets the largest canvas of all and is the most comfortable for coding and Light & Shadow. Everything is still touch-shaped — designed for a finger, driven with a trackpad or mouse — so it plays exactly like the iPad version with more room.
One free download covers iPhone, iPad and Mac.