Nautical Charts & Maps 12+

Buy this app. Totally worth it

This app is great and hopefully marks the beginning of the end of the 25 year chokehold Garmin and Navionics have held over the boating world. Every American has contributed to the costs of NOAA putting together map databases. And for years the big companies fought to keep the raw data out of the hands of the public. So now it is finally available but predictively difficult to manage downloading and using the RASTER maps. This program does the hard work for you so now you can use all of the NOAA maps for free, forever, for only the cost of this program. It still lacks the ease and functionality of the big players but the app will get better and better as more boaters use it. Really fun for loookingbst digital charts of far away waters without paying extra for more charts. Have fun.

Get it NOW!

If you’re on the fence, jump off and DL this app. It’s better than the description implies. If you have a question about it, email the developer. I did, and got a response within an hour. The app is easily the best $$ you’ll spend today. You will only have to spend it once, no subscription for updates like similar apps. I got this as a backup for my onboard plotter and paper charts.

Too slow to be useful

As I pan around, it’s taking my iPad Pro a really long time to render a particular screen. This slow tile-by-tile rendering of the image repeats every time I zoom or move around on the map. It’s so painful as to render the app unbearable.

I tried downloading all of the maps, too (which, as an aside, was a very frustrating exercise ... you should be able to just tap on maps in the list to start the downloads and let them progress concurrently ... the three modals per download meant that I had to sit down in front of the iPad for ~20 minutes to download all of the maps) and that didn’t solve it.

This app has plenty of data available, but it’s unwieldy.

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In the developer response, he says “after downloading the maps, the tiles load instantly.” But downloading multiple maps is a clumsy affair. This should be streamlined, getting rid of all of those modal dialog/alert boxes.

So thank you for taking the time to respond, but I’d suggest you revisit this downloading process. It’s really quite cumbersome (esp if you want to download multiple maps).

Developer Response ,

Hi, after downloading the maps the tiles load instantly. You need to press the button in the top left that says ‘switch to offline mode’.

After viewing the tiles instantaneously after downloading, please consider editing your review. Thank you.