Update: They changed the rules and screwed over their existing customers! Goodbye! – Wärtsilä iSailor Review

I’m changing my rating to one star because they suddenly, without warning, switched to a subscription fee model. This was after I had purchased hundreds of dollars worth of charts in reliance on a model that allowed me to regularly update any chart that I had purchased without paying an additional fee. They then retroactively decided that my “subscriptions” to these HUNDREDS of dollars worth of charts expired last March! I could understand if they needed to charge an additional fee to cover the administrative cost of updating the charts, but that would be only a relatively small cost per user. Instead, their new fees are way over the top, and are clearly intended to become a new profit center for the company. I’m sure that the app will continue to work well. But now there is absolutely no basis to use anything other than Navionics, which is the “gold” standard for the sailing industry. My original review is below: ——————————————- I have used this app everywhere, from Biscayne Bay, to the Adriatic, to the middle of the Caribbean. It can get a bit cluttered, but overall it’s great for basic route planning and tracking, and generally pretty intuitive to use. When sailing a thousand-mile passage in the Caribbean, it was great to be able to pull my iPhone out of my pocket at any time, day or night, and see our heading, COG, speed, and distance to waypoint. But... I recently bought the tides and tidal currents plug-in, in order to plan a voyage in the Pacific Northwest. The currents really rip, up there, so it’s critical to have down-to-the-minute accuracy on tides. To ensure accuracy, I compared times in the app with times on the Canadian government’s official tide tables, and found that the times were waaaay off. They weren’t event close. I soon realized that I needed to set the time zone in the iPad (I’m on the East Coast) to the time zone where I was planning my voyage (British Columbia). After doing that, and adjusting the Canadian tide tables for daylight savings time, the times were much closer. But close won’t count when crossing Seymour Narrows.
Review by Travis_McGee on Wärtsilä iSailor.