B&G: Companion App for Sailors 4+

Unreliable tries to access mobile data

Have B&G instruments on my sailboat and just purchased the new Zeus S. The Zeus S is mounted at the nav station and I thought I could use this app in the cockpit.
I want to like this app, it looks great and works well - when it works. But it loses positioning and the only way to know is see 0 for speed, somewhat dicey in a tight spot. It continually attempts to use wifi or cellular if enabled and most of my sailing is in remote locations with very slow internet access. The app hangs unresponsive as it seeks internet data. I can somewhat mitigate this by putting my phone in airplane mode but it leaves me without text messaging.

A setting for the user to set the app to only work offline would be a helpful addition. Overall not a reliable app for real time navigation. The Zeus S however is rock solid.

So far, so bad

My boat is equipped with B&G instruments. I was looking to spend several thousand dollars updating the chartplotter based on the promise of this app, and its capability to plan routes and then sync with their latest instruments. However, so far the app seems to be far from ready for prime time, and may even be risky to rely on for navigation. It is very unintuitive, buggy, and crashes regularly with a white screen appearing in some instances. Even basic functions such as route planning do not appear to work. I already use iNavX and TZiBoat. Both of these apps are streets ahead of B&G’s being much easier to use, and bug free and with many more features built in.

Furthermore, since 23rd June 2023, the B&G app refuses to launch and a splash screen says B&G is experiencing a “service outage”. Subscriptions have been extended based on this. Brunswick Corp that owns B&G has been the subject of a significant “IT Security Incident” that affected a number of their businesses and made headline news. Maybe they are related? Either way, I would advise not wasting your money yet on this app which is not even at Beta test level.

Really tried to like the app

I have B&G instruments on my boat and I’m quite happy with them but the app is terrible. I really tried to like it since it has world wide coverage but trying to download maps for offline use is the worst experience. I also have the Navionics app and the downloads work like a charm. On B&G I have selected 3 areas I wanted to have as offline maps and they just won’t download to my iPad. I get to 10 to 20 percent before the download stops. All this is on a super fast Fios connection. Given these results, it’s utterly unusable while on passage trying to update maps on a cell connection or public wifi. This is a problem since I first downloaded the app 2 years ago. I tried deinstalling and reinstalling with no change.
Really disappointing and even support could not help me when I contacted them a year ago.

Developer Response ,

Thank you for using our app and for reporting your issue. We were not able to reproduce it. Please send us a message from the Help & Feedback option within the app, so we can have our development team investigate your issue.