Cozy Culprits › Guides › Is There a Murdle App?
Is There a Murdle App?
Short answer: no. As of mid-2026 there is no official Murdle app for iPhone or Android. Murdle lives in two places — as a free daily puzzle on the web at murdle.com, and as a bestselling series of puzzle books — and neither its creator, G.T. Karber, nor his publisher lists a mobile app anywhere on the official site.
That one fact matters more than it sounds, because if you search "Murdle" in an app store today you will get results. None of them are official. This guide covers what Murdle actually is, why the app-store results deserve a skeptical eye, and what Murdle fans install on their iPhones to get the same one-murder-a-day ritual in app form.
What Murdle actually is
Murdle is a daily murder mystery logic puzzle created by G.T. Karber. Every day, murdle.com publishes a fresh case: a small cast of suspects, a handful of weapons and locations, and a list of clues. You solve it with a classic process-of-elimination logic grid — ticking and crossing combinations until only one suspect, one weapon, and one location remain. It's free to play in any browser, it takes a few minutes, and it ends with the deeply satisfying moment of formally accusing someone.
The web puzzle is only half the story. Murdle is also a book series — published by St. Martin's Press (a Macmillan imprint) — that became a genuine bestseller, spawned a junior edition for kids, and grew into a small universe of spin-offs and merchandise. The books, not an app, are Murdle's second home: hundreds of hand-crafted cases you solve with a pencil.
So the Murdle "platform list" in 2026 reads: web, paper. That's it.
Why is there no Murdle app?
Only Karber could answer definitively, and we won't put words in his mouth. But two practical observations explain a lot:
- The website already works on phones. murdle.com is playable in a mobile browser, so the most common reason to build an app — reaching phone users at all — is partly solved. If you just want daily Murdle on your iPhone, open the site in Safari and use Share → Add to Home Screen. You'll get an icon that opens straight into the puzzle.
- The books are the flagship. Murdle's commercial center of gravity is publishing. A free web daily that funnels fans toward the next book volume is a coherent strategy without an app in it.
Whether an official app ever ships is anyone's guess. What's certain is that right now, anything installable that trades on the name is not the real thing — which brings us to the ugly part.
The impostor problem: apps that borrow the name
Search an app store for "Murdle" and you'll find puzzle apps with soundalike names and detective-grid artwork, some openly describing themselves in terms of Murdle. Because there's no official app, the test is simple and absolute:
A few sanity checks before you install anything in this genre:
- Check the developer name. An official Murdle app would come from Karber or his publisher, and murdle.com would announce it loudly. Neither is true of anything in the stores today.
- Distrust "official" in a title or screenshot. Legitimate games in this genre — ours included — say plainly that they're independent.
- Watch for reskins. Some lookalikes are thin puzzle shells built to catch search traffic. If the screenshots don't show actual clue-solving, move on.
To be fair: some unaffiliated deduction games are genuinely good — being independent isn't a crime (in this genre, the crime is always in the Conservatory). The problem is only apps that pretend to be Murdle. Independent games that are upfront about what they are deserve a look on their own merits — and that's exactly the spirit in which we'll introduce ours.
What Murdle fans play on iPhone instead
What makes Murdle sticky isn't the logic grid — it's the ritual: one shared murder a day, a solve time, a streak to protect, a spoiler-free result to compare with friends. If that's the part you want as a real app on your phone, that's precisely the gap Cozy Culprits was built to fill.
Full disclosure, and worth repeating: Cozy Culprits is our game. It's an independent, free iPhone game made by a solo developer, and it is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Murdle or G.T. Karber. It isn't a Murdle clone either — the mechanics are different on purpose. Instead of ticking a process-of-elimination grid, you place suspects onto the floor plan of a crime scene, sudoku-style: no two suspects may share a row or column, furniture blocks cells, walls block adjacency, and every written clue must fit. When only one arrangement survives, the suspect standing in the victim's room is your murderer. (New to the format? Here's how murder sudoku works →)
How the daily ritual maps over
| The Murdle habit | In Cozy Culprits |
|---|---|
| One new case per day | A new daily case at midnight — in Easy (5×5), Medium (6×6) and Hard (7×7) |
| Everyone solves the same puzzle | Same board for every player worldwide, so comparisons are fair |
| Streaks | Daily streaks, plus per-difficulty leaderboards and a weekly league via Game Center |
| Sharing your result | A spoiler-free share card with your solve time |
| Fair-play deduction | Every case is solver-proven to have exactly one solution — you never have to guess |
| Playing anywhere | Fully offline, no account needed — flights and subway tunnels included |
Cozy Culprits is free with occasional ads (never during a puzzle), with a one-time $3.49 purchase to remove them — no subscription. There's also an interactive tutorial, a case-library campaign from Rookie to Mastermind, and a recurring cast of 16 suspects you'll learn to distrust individually.
If you'd rather survey the whole field first, we keep an honest, ranked roundup of games like Murdle — including web games, other apps, and the books — and a broader look at daily murder mystery games and why the one-a-day format works so well.