Tap “install” and you’ll have three real choices: Mahjong Soul, Riichi City, or Tenhou. For almost everyone reading this on a phone, the right one is Mahjong Soul. It’s free, it runs natively on iOS and Android, the English is genuinely good, and you can be in a real match within a few minutes of downloading it.
That’s the default answer. This article exists for the cases where it isn’t: where you want an app that teaches you as you go, where you’re weighing a phone screen against a browser tab, or where you want to know what “free” actually costs you before you commit an evening to it.
One correction up front, because it shapes everything below: none of these three are one-handed, portrait-mode apps. Mahjong Soul and Riichi City both run in landscape on a phone, same as they do on desktop, which means you’re holding the phone with two hands rather than glancing at it one-handed on a train platform. That changes what “mobile-friendly” actually means here, and it’s worth knowing before you install anything expecting a subway-scroll experience.
A quick note on where this information comes from. I play Mahjong Soul myself, so the Mahjong Soul section below reflects real hours in the app. Riichi City and Tenhou I haven’t put serious time into personally; those sections are built from official store listings, in-app screenshots, and what other players report, and I’ve flagged it inline wherever a claim isn’t first-hand.
Quick answer table
| If you want… | Install |
|---|---|
| The fastest path from download to a real ranked game | Mahjong Soul |
| An app that actively teaches the rules on your phone | Riichi City |
| The most respected competitive ladder (advanced players only) | Tenhou |
| The biggest pool of English-speaking opponents | Mahjong Soul |
| A gentler free-currency drip if you care about cosmetics | Riichi City |
| A single account synced across phone, browser, and desktop | Mahjong Soul |
| The cleanest, gacha-free monetization | Tenhou |
For the full reasoning behind this table — gacha math, rank systems, player pool data — see our three-way platform comparison. This article stays narrowly on the mobile experience: what these apps actually feel like to hold in your hand.
Mahjong Soul: the app to install first
Mahjong Soul was built for mobile from early on. It launched in China as a browser game in June 2018, and the English version arrived in April 2019 with iOS and Android clients alongside the browser version from day one. The phone interface reflects that: tiles are large enough to tap accurately without zooming, and menus are built for a thumb rather than a mouse cursor.
Screen and orientation: Landscape, same as the desktop and browser versions. You’ll be holding the phone with both hands rather than tapping one-handed while walking, so this is a sit-down-and-play app more than a glance-at-it-in-line app. Within that landscape layout, the anime character art and voice lines that define the game’s presentation render cleanly at phone size; nothing gets cropped or squeezed the way ports of desktop games sometimes do.
Data and connection: As a live multiplayer game, it needs a stable connection for the duration of a hand. A dropped connection mid-hand is the one real friction point of playing on mobile data rather than Wi-Fi. It’s not a heavy download, and matches move quickly, so it’s realistic to play on a commute if your connection holds and you’re comfortable holding the phone sideways.
How far free gets you on mobile: All the way, for the actual mahjong. Ranked play, both four-player and three-player, is completely free on the phone client. Nothing about the mobile version gates competitive play behind a purchase. What’s free-but-slow is the cosmetic gacha currency, which drips out gradually regardless of which device you’re playing on. If you’re only here for the mahjong and not the character collecting, the phone experience costs you nothing.
Account sync: Log in with the same account on your phone and a browser or the Windows client, and your progress, rank, and gacha collection carry over. That’s genuinely useful if you start a session on your phone and want to finish it at a desk later.
The tradeoff you’re already accepting by choosing this app: the anime presentation is loud, and it’s not something you can turn off. If that’s not your taste, it’s worth knowing before you tap install rather than after.
Who this fits on a phone: anyone who wants to sit down for a real session and get straight into a match without first fighting an unfamiliar interface. The tutorial is built for exactly that use case, taking a new player from a cold install to a first ranked hand in one sitting, even with the furiten and yaku gaps noted below.
For the deeper dive — gacha specifics, tutorial gaps, the rank ladder — read our full Mahjong Soul review.
Riichi City: the app that teaches you on your phone
Riichi City is the pick if you want your phone to actively teach you the game rather than just host it. According to its own store listing and community write-ups, its structured, step-by-step lesson system (the one reviewers compare to Duolingo) runs the same way on mobile as it does on desktop, and a lesson-based format suits short phone sessions well: focused steps that fit into small pockets of time rather than requiring a full hanchan.
Screen and orientation: Landscape on both iOS and Android, with full English UI alongside Japanese, Korean, and Chinese. Like Mahjong Soul, this is a two-handed, sit-down layout rather than a one-handed scrolling app; per its store listings, it isn’t a cramped port of a desktop UI either.
Where mobile play gets thinner: The real weakness carries over from the desktop version. Player reports consistently describe a smaller pool than Mahjong Soul’s that skews toward Japanese speakers. On a phone, where you’re more likely to be playing in short bursts and want a match to start immediately, a smaller pool can mean a longer wait to get matched, especially at odd hours for the platform’s dominant time zone.
How far free gets you on mobile: The core ranked game is free here too, and by community accounts the free gacha currency is meaningfully more generous than Mahjong Soul’s, with consensus putting it at roughly a ten-pull’s worth per month for an active free player. The ceiling on paid bundles is steep if you do decide to spend (a monthly pass runs $4.99, with top-end bundles running around $400), but none of it buys competitive advantage. It’s cosmetics, same as its rival.
Who this fits on a phone: someone who’d rather learn in short, guided steps between other tasks than get dropped into a live ranked match on day one. A lesson format built around discrete steps is arguably a better match for how most people actually use their phone in short sessions than a full hanchan (a complete east-and-south-round match) is.
If the lesson system is the reason you’re here, it’s worth reading the full case for it, and the honest tradeoffs, in our Riichi City review.
Tenhou on mobile: technically possible, not the phone pick
Tenhou does have iOS and Android clients, so it’s not absent from this list on a technicality. But it doesn’t belong in a “best app to install today” recommendation, and being straight about why matters more than padding out a third option.
There is no English interface, on the phone client or anywhere else Tenhou runs, and no tutorial. The design assumes you already know the rules cold and are showing up to prove it against a serious, largely Japanese-speaking competitive population, per player reports. None of that changes because you’re holding a phone instead of sitting at a desktop. If anything, fighting a Japanese-only UI on a small screen, without the browser extensions and third-party guides that make it more navigable on desktop, is a rougher version of an already unforgiving experience.
Tenhou earns its reputation, by player consensus, as the platform Japan trusts as the real measuring stick of skill, and if you’re already at that level, it’s worth having on your phone as a way to squeeze in ranked games between other things. It is not where a mobile-first search for “best mahjong app” should land you.
Who this fits on a phone: players who already use Tenhou’s desktop client and want the same account available for a quick ranked hand away from a keyboard, not someone discovering the platform for the first time via an app store search. For the full picture of why the platform is built this way, see our guide to Tenhou.
Switching between phone and desktop
If you expect to move between your phone and a bigger screen — a lunch-break game on the couch, a longer session at a desk in the evening — how well an account carries over matters as much as the mobile client itself.
Mahjong Soul is the strongest here by a clear margin. The same account works across browser, iOS, Android, Steam, and a dedicated Windows client, and progress, rank, and your gacha collection all sync automatically. Start a hand on your phone during a commute, and you can pick the same account back up on a desktop that evening without anything resetting.
Riichi City supports the same idea across browser, iOS, Android, and Steam, with one account carrying your progress between them. What doesn’t carry over as cleanly is matchmaking speed: its smaller player pool means switching to your phone won’t fix a quiet lobby the way it might on Mahjong Soul’s larger, more active base.
Tenhou also runs across browser and mobile under one account, but since neither surface has an English interface or onboarding, switching devices doesn’t remove any of the friction that makes it a poor first app regardless of screen size.
Offline play and practice: what your phone can’t do here
Worth being upfront about a gap in all three apps: none of them are built as offline, solo-practice tools. They’re live multiplayer platforms first, and connecting to a match requires an internet connection every time. If you’re picturing a mahjong app you can open on a plane or in a signal dead zone to drill hands against AI, that’s not the category these three sit in. Riichi City’s lesson system is the closest thing to structured solo practice among the three, but it’s still a guided path toward playing live matches rather than a standalone offline trainer.
What that means practically: budget for a live connection whenever you sit down to play, and don’t expect meaningful single-player content beyond scattered tutorial-stage exercises inside Mahjong Soul’s and Riichi City’s onboarding flows. If your goal is to learn the rules before you ever touch an app, that’s better handled with a written guide first; see the next section.
If you’ve already tried one and it didn’t stick
Not every install survives contact with the first real session, and the reason usually points to a specific mismatch rather than “mahjong apps aren’t for me.”
If Mahjong Soul felt overwhelming or too anime for your taste, the mahjong underneath is still sound. The friction is almost always the presentation, not the tutorial or the interface logic. Riichi City gives you the same free-ranked-play, English-first shape of app with a calmer on-ramp via its lesson system, if the character-driven aesthetic was the actual problem.
If you installed Riichi City and struggled to find matches, that’s the known tradeoff of its smaller, more Japan-centered player pool showing up exactly where you’d expect: at matchmaking. Mahjong Soul solves that specific problem directly, at the cost of a less structured first-session experience.
If you tried Tenhou first because it kept coming up in search results and bounced off the Japanese-only interface, that’s not a sign you’re not cut out for the game. It’s a sign you started on the wrong end of the difficulty curve. Come back to it after a few months on Mahjong Soul or Riichi City, once furiten, yaku, and basic scoring aren’t things you need to think about mid-hand.
The next step
If you haven’t actually learned riichi mahjong yet and are shopping for an app before you know what a winning hand looks like, that’s the wrong order. Start with our beginner’s guide to riichi mahjong; ten minutes there will save you a confused first few games on whichever app you pick, especially around furiten and the yaku requirement, the two rules every app tutorial tends to gloss over.
Once you know the rules and want the fuller reasoning behind an app choice (rank systems, gacha economics, player pool data broken down by platform), our Mahjong Soul vs Tenhou vs Riichi City comparison is the article this one was deliberately kept short in favor of. This page is the phone-screen answer; that one is the full case file.
FAQ
What is the best riichi mahjong app for iPhone? Mahjong Soul. It runs natively on iOS, has native-quality English, and syncs your account across your phone, browser, and desktop if you switch devices. Riichi City is the runner-up if you specifically want in-app lessons on your phone.
Is there a good riichi mahjong app for Android? Yes, and it’s the same answer as iOS: Mahjong Soul for the biggest English-speaking player pool, Riichi City if you want structured lessons built into the app. Both have full Android clients, not stripped-down ports.
Can I play Tenhou on my phone? Tenhou has iOS and Android clients, but there’s no English interface or tutorial on any platform it runs on, phone included. It’s not a mobile pick-up-and-play app the way Mahjong Soul and Riichi City are — treat it as a destination for later, not a starting point on your phone.