Navionics® Boating

So first and foremost, this app is my go to for planning our fishing trips as well as locating possible new spots. This has been so accurate with the newest iPhone’s gps that we used it as a primary when the sportfish we were on lost all electronics. We came home with a boat load of fish! But the most recent update is TERRIBLE and reduced the quality to crap for relief shading. Used to see the bottom just fine and seemed worth paying for. When my subscription is up I’m going to another charting system unless they bring it back. There’s areas that were not high detailed and it made up for that with the areas that were. Now no areas are detailed other than ones that you can literally zoom in on google earth and see. And actually see better than what this app is giving you. I’ve used y’all for 5 years+. Please don’t dump on the long term guys by making the shading terrible. If Garmin forced your department to decrease the visibility on the bottom put that in the update notes so people at least have a choice going forward. There isn’t a single noticeable difference in the “new and better” shading style. I don’t know if they see it as competition and want all people to move to the chart plotter cards but it’s terrible now. If you haven’t updated your app yet and see this don’t update! Please bring back the old shading I will put y’all at five stars.

Honestly, this is a near perfect app! With one fix, it would be invaluable for safe boating! My family and I deeply appreciate the way it shows water depth accurately with many ways to personalize the system (examples: preferred units of measure and color coding). It has impressive features, including a way to have it adjust for when the water level is down any number of feet. There is only one problem: the default orientation is “North Up.” It causes major frustration and increases potential danger as it requires boat drivers to spend extra time staring at the app. We’ve tried unsuccessfully to set it for “Heads Up” orientation (so it matches the left/right of the boat’s reality). In Settings, we select “Heads Up” display, but it quickly returns to “North Up.” It’s a serious frustration and big disappointment. They should fix it to lock in the display orientation we select and/or change the default to the user-friendly “Heads Up.” Please!

I had the free app and went out ice fishing on lake Ontario and it was blowing a steady 30. I knew a storm was coming but the fish were biting and i had walked over 3 miles to the spot so i ended up staying way to long. By the time i was packed up there was 3 inches of snow and a total whiteout. i had very little cell service like most places on the lake and started walking the direction i knew was land. After 20-30 minutes i checked google maps to see if it had me almost at shore and it said i had actually over shot the point i went from and was on the east side of it. It was only maybe 1/3 mile away but well after what felt like closer to a mile i checked google maps again to see where i was and it said i was over a mile from land. I then remembered navionics and when i used it it showed me about half a mile from what google maps said. I decided to trust this and follow the arrow all the way back for about a mile and see what google maps says. After almost a mile following the navionics i started to see dock lights and was relieved. I checked google maps twice walking back and both times it had me over half a mile from my real location. I was out there walking for to two to two half hours between taking breaks and checking for service and i was getting exhausted. This app really did save me that night got to single digits and was gusting to 40 plus. Ill probably buy it every year until they stop updating the maps.