Right now, I believe Aqua Map has the strongest offering out there. Garmin has promised that the Navionics suite of boating apps will have ActiveCaptain Community support by the end of the calendar year. US & Canadian charts with lifetime updates are $39.99, US only is $24.99, and there’s a one year option for $14.99. There previously have been quite a few Aqua Map products that are in the process of being consolidated under the free app with in-app purchases for charts. I’m hopeful we’ll continue to see more robust route management via the web viewer.Īqua Map is a free download on both iOS and Android. For instance, AIS support would be great, as would the ability to display depth and other info available on the boat.

I’d love to see more integration with existing on-board gear. Rather than displaying individual soundings, Aqua Map draws a boundary and puts the soundings along the edge of the boundary.There’s still room for some additional features. In a number of areas Aqua Map displays depth boundaries in a way that I’ve found confusing (and in fact one time probably contributed to my getting in some trouble, more on that in another entry). The routing and tracking functions are both quite good, but if there’s a way to see a list of all your routes and tracks, I haven’t found it. This would allow you to see more of the chart ahead of you than behind. I’d really like chart offset so the vessel icon isn’t centered on the screen. Some of these might be quibbles, while others feel a little more significant.

While Aqua Map is already pretty nice to use, there are a few improvements I’d love to see.

Great as the anchor alarm is, I’m having a few problems with receiving GPS errors on my iPad Mini 4 that I haven’t seen in other apps. If you’re anything like me you’ve probably forgotten to set the anchor alarm exactly as you drop the anchor more often than not. Aqua Map has implemented a very nice feature allowing you to either set the anchor location as your current GPS location, or allowing you to point your device at where the anchor is set and specify the distance to the anchor. The anchor alarm function could probably be an entire entry unto itself.

Navionics anchor alarm