Tide Charts 4+

I use this app to plan my 8-mile beach walks and to plan when I will swim in the ocean. This app is more useful than my paper tide calendar for daily use. I love that it tells me the exact feet and inches at the moment with a little arrow pointing up or down for rising or falling tide. I love how clear the graph is, showing me how the tide will be rising and falling throughout the day and night, and clearly showing me sunrise and sunset as well. This helps me plan my walks and swims so I do not get clobbered with waves crashing against cliffs or rocks while walking, and can float over rocks while swimming, and to plan for sunlight or starlight. I still use my paper tide calendar to see future tides more than a week or two out, yet if need be, I can scroll over to see future tides on the app as well. When I am not working and have free time, I probably use my tide app about four times or more and that is nearly everyday. I love this app!!!

This was a very simple and useful app for a long time until recently, when I started to receive a lot of annoying and unprofessional advertising on it. I don’t really mind ads in general, as I know they need to make money, but the way they are implementing advertising on this app results in an unacceptable use experience. Two recent examples come to mind: (1) I received a survey invitation in the app to weigh in on building the wall between the US and Mexico. The survey itself was strongly biased toward one particular point of view, and wasn’t really a scientific survey or poll intended to get true public sentiment, so I found it annoying to go through, knowing the results would not be used fairly. And (2) Today, I received an interstitial ad with uninitiated audio, which means that music started to play for an ad as I open the app without any ability to control to stop it for a period of time. This is totally unacceptable advertising on any digital platform, except perhaps if you’re visiting a site or app where you expect uninitiated audio, like a movies review site/app. I am an expert in user experience, advertising online, and design, and I can tell you from years of experience and tons of data that this will make users extremely annoyed. It does not work as an effective form of advertising in the long run. Therefore, I am deleting this app from my phone and seeking alternatives.

I'm a long term user of a different tide app called TideApp. A bit ago their update took away a lot of functionality making it no better then a tide table. A new search for a better app lead me here. So far so good. Accuracy is good and there are a bunch of other thinks like moon phase and local weather in this app. Although this app lacks the ability to know the height of the tide at any time, (so I can know when its deep enough to put my boat in) not just at high and low, the graph is moveable to line up with the edge of the screen so you can figure it out. Overall this has easily replaced my prior app for tides. Glad they are there. If they put in functionality of using you'd finger to move along the graph to see height at any time I would even go pro and pay $ to remove ads or whatever.