Magic Trick Apps to Learn From or Perform With

Some magic apps teach you a trick to do with your own hands, a deck of cards or a coin. The others are the trick: the phone is the prop, and the app does the secret part while you do the talking. The prices have little in common, so decide which you are after first. To learn and pay nothing, install 52Kards. For one trick at a party, on any phone, iForce is $2.99.

Prices are the ones shown in the US stores and will differ where you live. Each trick is described the way its own listing describes it, so nothing below gives a method away.

Apps that teach you magic

52Kards promises hundreds of free magic tutorial videos, next to a shop for designer playing cards. Google Play shows no ads label and nothing to buy inside the app, and the App Store version is free with no in-app purchases either. The shop is the commercial side of it, and Apple files the app under Shopping. One oddity for parents: Apple rates it 18+, while Google Play rates it Everyone.

Master Magic Tricks is the large library, if you will pay for it. Magic Makers’ App Store listing counts 4,000 instructional videos covering card tricks, mind-reading and illusions, on both stores. The app is free to install and the full library needs a subscription. On its own website the price is $12.97 a month or $99.97 a year, after a 7-day free trial. Twelve months at the monthly rate come to $155.64, so the yearly plan saves $55.67. Take the trial first, and go yearly only once you know you will keep using it. The listing warns that prices inside the app vary by region.

Learn Magic Tricks: Easy & Fun lists more than 1,000 tutorials on sleight of hand, cards, coins and mentalism, with step-by-step guides and lessons that work offline. On Google Play it is free with ads and in-app purchases, and the listing names Riafy Technologies as the company behind the Rstream Labs account. On iPhone the same company sells it as Magic Tricks – Learn & Master.

Conjuro: Card Tricks Magic, from IVY apps, does not make its own lessons. Its listing says it gathers free tutorial videos from around the internet and sorts them into courses, from card grips and shuffles to coin vanishes and mentalism, with levels and daily challenges to keep you practising. That sorting is the product. It is on Google Play, free with ads and in-app purchases.

Marvin’s Magic, free with in-app purchases on both stores, is only for people who own one of the company’s boxed magic sets. You scan the QR code in the instruction booklet to register the set, and the app adds video instructions and augmented reality effects for the props in the box.

One to skip for now: Penguin Magic’s Teach Me a Magic Trick is free with in-app purchases on both stores, but its listing is two sentences long and never says what you get. Magic Tricks by Mikael Montier has gone from both stores.

Apps that are the trick

These are props. You still have to perform, and each one comes with instructions from its maker.

iForce is the cheap way in, on Google Play and the App Store. In the listing’s example you ask someone to think of their favourite food, doodle a prediction on the phone and leave it face down. When they say “sushi”, you turn the phone over and that is what you drew. To anyone watching it looks like a plain drawing app.

Rising Card is the same price and iPhone only, and it is a single effect. A friend names any card, shakes the phone, and that card rises out of a photo of a deck.

Magic Notes passes as a note-taking app on Android. You type a prediction, put the phone down, and it matches the number, card, coin toss or star sign the other person comes up with. A tutorial is built in. Card2Phone on iPhone is sold as visual magic, with 52 playing card faces, more than 70 card backs and 62 currencies to choose from. A Pro upgrade inside it adds everyday objects.

There are free ones too. Magic Trick – Mind Reading by Itai Levi has no ads label and nothing to buy on Google Play. A spectator swipes through cards and stops on any one, and you know which. No app here really reads minds. Each one is a trick you perform, and Inject’s own listing says it is for entertainment and does not provide true mind reading.

What working magicians pay for

Inject, once called Inject 2 and listed on the App Store as Inject-Magic, has 21 effects behind an in-app purchase. What sets it apart is that the effect happens on the spectator’s own phone. In one example from the listing, they point to any name on a list of 20 celebrities and find that the search you made on their phone earlier was for that person. It needs an internet connection, and the listing notes that the right to perform it on television is not included. It is not on Google Play: Rostami Magic’s page there lists only iForce and another app called ReaList.

AnyWeb describes itself as a magic browser for performing what magicians call forces, on any website or app. Both listings state the price in plain words.

With WikiTest, someone looks up anything they like on Wikipedia on their own phone and thinks of a word on the page, and you name both the subject and the word. There is an optional Pro Tools subscription on top, listed at $5.49 a month. At $109.99 it only makes sense if you perform for people regularly. With Inject or WikiTest, read the whole listing and watch the maker’s demonstration before paying.

If you would rather watch than perform, we also have a list of magician specials on Netflix.