Anchor Alarm - SailGrib AA v3.2

★★★★★

A Google user

Initially rated a 1 star due to SMS not working for US phone numbers. The developer quickly responded and stated working the problem. The problem has been corrected, unfortunately my bare boat charter is over. I'll use it next year on my boat.

★★★★

Shayne Young

Good simple anchor alarm. Some great features like the integrating navionics maps. Being able to only set a circle for anchor area is bit of a pain for stern to anchor setups

★★★

Royce Johnson

Great UI, can't prevent lock screen from disabling it. While the map can be dragged to center it on the anchor, the distance/bearing display from boat to anchor it hard to read and only appears when zoomed way in (fill most of screen with boat-to-anchor line). Great integration with Navionics. Bugaboo with all anchor alarms in Android is their inability to defeat the lock screen when monitoring so the alarm quits monitoring as soon as the lock screen turns on.

★★

A Google user

I downloaded this to use with offline maps, which is important in my area. Turns out you need to download another app (Sailgrib WR) and pay for offline maps. Then it's a struggle to get the AA app to find the map files downloaded with the WR app. Also there are no satellite imagery maps available offline. The app also makes an annoying beep every 5 seconds when the GPS gets a reading. I finally figured out how to get rid of that in phone settings but you have to be careful not to disable all sounds because then the main function of the app, an alarm, won't even sound. The alarm sound also isn't very piercing. It's kind of a low volume and I'm afraid it won't wake me up. Also the app says you have to leave the screen on for it to work. That will be annoying sleeping with a screen on and will drain battery even faster, hopefully not faster than it can charge. Too many variables to go wrong for me to trust this app so I use another app for the alarm and just keep this running in the background because I can use it for the offline NOAA map.

★

Erik SV Cash Flow

My review was initially 3 stars because the app doesn't interface with gps info sent via wifi from my AIS (like navionics does). But after the way the developer replied to my review while ignoring the email I sent, I can only give it what it deserves... I found an app called Sail Expert, it interfaces with my external GPS and has a brilliant anchor alarm function, as well as all other NMEA instrument data like depth and wind, sent wirelessly.