Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum Piano apps

Can anyone suggest their favourite learning app. I tried Simply Piano but it doesn’t seem to go very far.

Nobody replied to this, yet, so I'll give it a try.


I've not tried Simply Piano, but Google has decided those are the only ads it will show me, now.

For the last six months, I've been working my way through Piano Marvel. While I have some criticisms of it, it seems to be well structured and serious. My use has been to go through and firm up some foundational skills that I've neglected over the years. I can see that even after I get through their curriculum, the program can still be useful for keeping up sight reading and learning new pieces in their extensive library.

Most of the apps provide a free trial so you can evaluate it.

What are your goals and musical interests, and where are you at in your piano journey?

I started as a total beginner a couple months ago, and use two apps, as well as Alfred's adult piano book 1. I use Simply Piano and Flowkey. I can't stand the amount of Simply Piano ads I come across, but I've found the app to be great for me as a complete beginner. I'm already into the Intermediate II section in Simply Piano, and there's no way I'm an intermediate player. I think what these apps are good for is giving a fantastic crash course into the whole piano experience which should be enough to provide a very solid foundation upon which to build.
The way I see it~
Simply Piano- Great for getting accustomed to sight reading, and has a great positive enforcement feedback loop with an arcade game-like experience.
Flowkey- Great for learning your pieces, and very importantly, the fingering for those pieces. Each song has a video of the performer showing fingerings which you can either watch in real time, or have it only move as you hit the correct notes.
I'd say Simply Piano goes much further in guiding the learner, whereas Flowkey has less instruction and may be better for intermediate players. I would absolutely choose Simply Piano to help with sight reading over Flowkey though.

Before I decided to restart in-person piano lessons, I first tested both Skoove and Flowkey. A big caveat in my situation is that I had taken piano lessons when I was younger, but when I first started using Skoove, I hadn't played the piano in 20 years.

I personally found Skoove to be great introduction to the piano (or re-introduction in my case). The lessons were fun, informative and broken down into easily manageable chunks. I cannot say how they would be for a complete beginner, but I advanced through the lessons pretty quickly. However the main issue with Skoove is that you only really learn to play sections of many of the songs, so there is a limit to how far you can go with Skoove, so I eventually switched over to Flowkey, which offered a much large selection of pieces to learn and in various difficulty levels.

Flowkey definitely offers a wider variety of pieces to learn, so it is better for actually trying to develop a repertoire as well as for learning easier versions of pieces and moving on to more advanced versions of the same pieces. However, the actual lessons were so boring that I couldn't get through all of them, so I'm not sure how great Flowkey is for an actual beginner trying to learn piano for the first time rather than for an intermediate player using it to learn to play more advanced pieces.

In retrospect I do think that the apps could hinder some of the mental development needed to become a fully well-rounded piano player, as the apps set the tempo for you visually, instead of you needing to learn to count and keep the tempo inside of your head while also keeping track of your hands and fingering.

I have started with Skoove. But today I mainly use Piano Marvel. In my opinion it's much easier to learn songs with PM. They also teach you Method and Technique. Also unique is their Sight Reading practice and test.
Works with Digital Pianos (BT or Cable connection) and also with acoustic pianos via microphone.

Currently I would fully recommend Piano Marvel. For me, as a late adult beginner (play since 6 months) the perfect learning app.

so about that microphone for acoustics? i emailed a lot with PM earlier this year, they said they were coming out the functionality for acoustics - is that how you are doing it?

Sorry, I mixed this up with the Skoove app. Skoove has the possibility to use your iPad/computer microphone to control your play. PM has currently only the so called "Book Mode" or (what I use) the BT/cable connection.

"Book Mode allows you to manually track your progress and play along with songs and exercises. Book Mode is designed for practice without a MIDI connection and does not provide the feedback and scores that Assessment Mode does."

So when I restarted my journey after a 10-year hiatus from a truly laughable attempt to make progress through some theory books I jumped into the apps. Like someone above me said they all have trials which I HIGHLY recommend you do first. What works for me may not be what works for you. I settled on Yousician and Skoove. Skoove was first then Yousician for me. I liked Youscian's layout and "practice mode" to a degree (though it's really just a randomizer), but Skoove's process made the most sense where you work on hands separately until they are performing how it should be then bring it together. First, you learn the notes and fingering then you learn the timing. Where Yousician is just somewhat blunt force it until you get it (Though there is a practice mode you can go into and practice the same) but it's not presented as a way of learning so as someone new you may not realize it as an ideal way to learn at the start.