Anchor AlarmAnchorQueen · v2.4.1
What's new in AnchorQueen 2.4.1
A maintenance-and-instruments release. Your boat's own network can now drive
the chart, chart styling stopped being a paid feature, the weather tab gained
an animated live map, and the Apple Watch finally warns you before the siren
instead of only with it.
Remote starts when you arm SafeAnchor
For Real-Time Remote, Pro, and Max captains, arming SafeAnchor now gets or
creates the boat's private Remote channel, connects it, publishes the first
live fix, and switches on Live Beacon automatically. You only need to share
the ready invite code. Free captains can still see public beacons and join a
channel by invite, but their boat does not auto-create or auto-broadcast one.
See Remote and
SafeAnchor — Automatic Live Beacon.
Remote includes one chart and a quicker start
The Remote advantage now leads when you enter the Store from the Remote tab:
live shore watch, automatic Live Beacon, private channels, and one chart
region while Remote remains active. After Apple confirms the subscription,
tap Choose your chart packs to go directly to the chart catalog; the
included region shows Download, claims the Remote slot securely, and starts
downloading. After that one choice, other regions show their live yearly price.
Your boat's network can drive the chart
If you run a Signal K server on board, AnchorQueen can now treat it as a
first-class position source instead of a read-only instrument feed.
self vessel from the server isdrawn with the same hull symbol used for navigation and anchor watch —
named, rotated to heading or COG, and tappable. Tapping it flies the chart
to the boat instead of landing on empty water.
or not a voyage is running.
chart and the anchor watch to the server's fix rather than the phone's
GPS. The GPS HUD then reports position, HDG, COG, SOG, accuracy and the
distance between the device fix and the Signal K fix, so a disagreement is
visible rather than silent.
reconnection were reworked end to end after the feature proved impossible to
complete from a boat in practice.
See Settings — instrument sources and
Chart themes and base maps are free for everyone
Depth palettes (Coastal Alert, Reef Guardian, and the rest) and the alternative
base maps (satellite and the other styles) were locked behind a paid plan.
They are now available on every tier, including Free. Nothing to buy,
nothing to restore — open the layers control and pick.
See Chart — layers and themes.
Two new charts, a paper theme, and smarter soundings
Two new bundled, fully offline charts join Nautica Day and Night — free like
the rest of the family:
regime between the Day and Night charts. Everything stays dim enough to
protect your night vision, but the chart keeps more shape detail than the
red-shifted Night chart. Made for the evening watch.
on: paper-white deep water, printed chart-blue shallows, a green drying
band and buff land, with black linework.
A matching Paper Chart / Paper Dusk depth-theme pair joins the theme
picker, and the picker keeps day and night families in step as before.
Sounding numbers also got an Auto density mode — now the default. Auto
spaces depth numbers the way an ECDIS does: roomy at passage-planning zoom,
dense while piloting, and numbers deeper than your draft plus safety margin
step back into a quiet grey so the shallow digits that can ground you stand
out. The Sparse / Balanced / Dense choices are still there if you prefer a
fixed density.
See Chart — soundings.
A live weather map in Meteo
The Meteo tab gained a Live section: an animated,
full-screen weather map with temperature, rain, wind, pressure and radar
fields, plus wind-arrow and isobar overlays you can play forward in time.
Wind speeds were reading low — fixed
For captains on metric units, wind and gust values from the forecast service
were being displayed as knots when the service had returned metres per second
— a reading roughly half the true speed. Every affected surface is fixed:
the hourly wind grid, the wind-and-gust chart and its Beaufort banding, the
weather pins, the surface-current readout, and the daily summaries. If a
forecast ever looked implausibly gentle, this was why.
The Apple Watch warns before it wakes you
The watch UX was designed around a five-rung Attention Ladder — a quiet
nudge, then an advisory, then a pre-warning, then the alarm — but the phone
only ever produced silent or alarm. The intermediate rungs are now real:
("82 % of radius"),
light sleeper is pre-warned rather than startled,
The phone's own siren and notification behaviour is unchanged in this release.
Also fixed: the anchor glyph on the watch dial and in the complications drew
nothing at all — a blank space where the anchor should be — on some
screens since the watch app first shipped.
See SafeAnchor — the Apple Watch companion.
Chart and alarm can no longer disagree
The anchor ring on the chart used to run its own, simpler drift arithmetic
than the alarm engine: no hysteresis, no dwell window, no allowance for GPS
accuracy. In marginal conditions the ring could show you outside the circle
while the alarm stayed quiet, or the reverse. The chart is now a direct
projection of the alarm engine's state — one source of truth, one answer.
See SafeAnchor — the anchor watch.
Nothing disappears when the sounder returns a bad number
If a depth sounder reported a non-numeric value, saving could fail silently —
and the most visible consequence was that an active anchorage did not
restore after relaunching the app. Every affected store now writes such
values safely. Existing saved data is unaffected and upgrades cleanly.
A live speed graph that works without instruments
The HUD's trend graphs used to appear only if you had a Signal K server
connected, and only covered depth and wind. Now there is a speed graph on
the end of the row, and it is drawn on every install.
mid-passage — the speed trace keeps drawing from your device's own GPS fix. A
small tag beside the title says which feed you are looking at: SK for the
boat's log, GPS for the handset. The trace is not cleared when the link
changes hands, because your speed over ground doesn't change when the boat's
Wi-Fi does.
high of the plotted window, and its rate of change — so a trace tells you
how much, not just which way.
minute and turns amber when the seabed is coming up, which is the cue
that a bank is rising under you before the depth number itself looks
alarming.
"are we holding our planned speed?" is the live question.
Your instruments now report the tide
When your instruments send both speed through the water and a heading, the
expanded HUD gains a CUR tile: the set (the direction the current is
flowing towards) and the drift (its rate in knots).
No single instrument reports this — it is the difference between what the water
says you are doing and what the satellites say you are doing, and it is the
difference between an ETA that holds and one that slips by an hour. It stays
hidden below 0.2 kn, where the answer would be log calibration error rather
than tide.
See Chart — live instrument readout.
Your fleet is on the chart HUD
When you are in a Remote channel — a private channel or a flotilla — the GPS HUD
now grows a REMOTE section directly below the instruments, in the same
language as the instrument link above it. Like that section it appears only when
a channel is joined; if you never use Remote, the HUD is unchanged.
QUIET when you are in the channel but nobody has sent a fix recently —
because connected and talking are not the same claim. The channel name and
a ticking "last fix" age sit alongside.
with the boat's photo inside its status ring (teal at anchor, indigo under
way, red dragging, grey offline), its name, and its live distance from
you. Tap one and the row above becomes that boat's locator — hull sprite
turned to its heading, live coordinate, and HDG · SOG · BATT · YOU↔BOAT.
Tap the locator and the chart flies to it at your current zoom.
and fits the whole channel on the chart with the connection web drawn in.
the moment any boat in the channel reports a dragging anchor, whichever vessel
you had selected — one tap selects it and puts it on screen. Collapsed, the
rail's RMT·n chip turns red with a ⚠, so the alarm survives collapsing the
card.
(amber below 30 %, red below 15 — a watched boat whose phone dies stops
reporting drift at all), FIX age and anchor RADIUS, plus TRACK
(follow camera, standing down on its own if the boat goes quiet), BOARD
(the full vessel sheet), WATCH (mirror only that boat's anchor rings,
instead of twenty overlapping swing circles) and FIT.
See Chart — your fleet on the HUD and
Passage state says its piece, then gets out of the way
The coloured passage-state pill (On Land, Anchored, Sailing,
At Sea…) was permanently parked on the minimized HUD rail, holding a third
of a one-line watch display to tell you something you already knew.
hands its width back to the place name — so a long anchorage name reads in
full instead of truncating to its first word.
place name, for as long as the card is open. Collapsing the HUD also
re-announces the current state.
A calmer, more readable HUD
actions, stacks latitude and longitude on their own lines, and gives
bearing, distance and depth fixed columns so numbers stop jumping around.
bar, including panels left in an awkward position by an earlier version.
Smoother charts under load
Two chart surfaces did heavy depth work on the main thread and could stall the
interface: the anchor depth panel (which rescanned up to 5 000 track
points against the sounding database) and the route depth samplers. Both
now work off the main thread. Panning and scrubbing stay responsive on long
tracks and long routes.
Two long jobs also stopped pretending to be quick. Exporting the ship's
logbook (PDF or CSV) now renders in the background behind a real progress
ring that names each step and fills as the pages are laid out, instead of an
endless spinner over a frozen app — see
Captain's Notebook. Importing a
GPX file likewise reads and builds off the main thread, showing a live count
of the points read and the routes built, so a large recorded track no longer
looks like a hang — see Chart.
The ship's log: import a track, share the pages
The log sheet in Capt's Notebook → Logbook grew a ⋯ menu, so the
log's paperwork now lives where the log does:
watch, or tracking app into the log as position-fix entries — on the days
it was actually sailed, filed under its own closed voyage, thinned to your
underway-fix cadence, with speed and course worked out per leg and times
shown in the ship's time for where the track was sailed. Points already in
the log are skipped, so importing the same file twice adds nothing, and
every imported line carries an IMPORT badge plus an opening entry
naming the file it came from. A GPX without timestamps is refused with a
pointer to the route importer — history needs times.
spreadsheet CSV, or a GPX track of the log's positions (one segment per
voyage) right from the sheet and opens the share sheet — WhatsApp, Mail,
AirDrop, Files, print. The same exports remain in Settings.
The log is now a floating window, not a docked sheet. It used to be
welded to the bottom of the chart, resizable only in height and only by a
thin strip at its top — the timeline slider swallowed every other drag.
Now you drag it by its header to anywhere on the chart, resize it from any
of its four corner grips (each keeps the opposite corner pinned, so a window
against the right edge widens leftwards without moving first), and close it
with ✕ (which returns you to Marks, the same pill that opens the log). There are no preset heights: it rests exactly where and
at whatever size you leave it, per orientation, remembered between sessions.
A vertical drag across the timeline slider moves the window rather than
being swallowed; sideways still scrubs the days. Because the log no longer
owns the bottom edge, the depth-palette legend and the Notebook pills stay
where they always are.
See Captain's Notebook.
A smaller download, and more room to run in the background
AnchorQueen is about 16 MB smaller to install. A chart file for one region had
been shipping inside the app for a long time without ever being loaded — the
app only reads charts you actually download — so it has been removed. Nothing
you can see on the chart changes.
The bigger change is invisible until it matters. The worldwide coastline the
app uses to answer "is this position ashore or afloat?" was being unpacked in
full and kept in memory for as long as the app was running — including all
night while an anchor watch is armed. It is now read directly from storage,
a fraction at a time, which frees roughly 45 MB. iOS decides which background
apps to shut down when memory runs short, so a smaller anchor watch is a
watch that is less likely to be closed while you sleep. The answers it gives
are identical.
AIS traffic flies its flag again
Nearby AIS vessels show the flag of their registry on the chart, drawn at the
stern of the hull and turning with it. The flag had been missing entirely: the
chart's text renderer cannot draw flag characters, so it was silently dropped
wherever the vessel's name appeared. It is now drawn as part of the boat
symbol instead. Contacts whose identity carries no recognisable registry show
the hull alone, as before.
The vessel detail sheet shows the ship, not a pictogram
Tapping an AIS contact used to open on a generic symbol — a box for a cargo
ship, a ferry glyph for everything the feed hadn't typed — and a name with a
bare flag emoji stuck on the end.
the chart uses for that vessel, turned to its heading inside a compass rose,
trailing the same foam when it is making way and showing its ground tackle
when it is at anchor.
name — in the Identity section and under the vessel's name — because several
flags are near-identical at badge size. On Android the flag is spelled out
in the same two places.
at anchor, fishing, aground, restricted, with speed alongside. Contacts that
broadcast no navigational status at all — most small craft — now read
Making way or Not making way from their speed instead of showing no
state at all.
AIS traffic stops flickering
Two separate flickers, both from live data arriving faster than anything on
screen could usefully change.
space and being re-judged ten times a second as the hulls moved, so a name
near another one blinked in and out. Names now simply stay put; the chart
still holds them back until you are zoomed in past 13.
position report — several times a second — which made the whole page shimmer
while you were reading it. It now follows the contact once a second, which is
faster than any of these numbers meaningfully change.
Charts read obstructions correctly
A tagged underwater obstruction whose water level was known always drew the
generic "depth not stated" symbol. Obstruction symbols now reflect the real
water level, matching the paper-chart convention.
Purchases and account records
refresh, so a plan bought on one device is recognised reliably on the
others.
rather than anything reusable, and older records are cleaned up as they are
touched.
profiles that could be created without them.
Build a route straight on the chart
Route mode gains a placement flow it never had. A Command Rail down the
left edge arms a slot — Drop DEP, Drop ARR, Add Waypoint — and the
next tap on the chart (or a hold-to-confirm long press) fills it. Add Waypoint
stays armed, so a four-leg passage is four taps.
rows, not seven; a command that becomes valid animates in. A DEP → VIA →
ARR step indicator sits at the head of the rail.
which you chose.
notice rather than silently seeding an unsolvable route.
capsule, and numbered via-points between them.
planner solves each leg between them and your waypoints keep their identity.
See Chart — Route mode.
Planned routes stop cutting corners across land
The route planner could return a leg that clipped a headland or slipped
diagonally between two land cells — a corner-touch gap was being treated as a
passage, and the smoothing pass could straighten a one-cell dodge back into a
chord that crossed the shore.
Every stage of the planner now checks the water under the whole line rather
than sampling it: diagonal moves need both neighbouring cells navigable,
simplification refuses to merge a leg whose merged line would cross land, and
channel-centreline splicing validates its full replacement chain and keeps the
original waypoints if it can't. The same rules already ran on the Android app,
so a route planned on either now has the same shape.
This does not replace your own check of the chart. A planned route is a
proposal from the depth data on your device, not a guarantee of clear water.
See Chart — Route mode and
Jules shows his work on the chart
When Jules plans a route for you, the answer now includes an
interactive card underneath the text: a mini-map of the saved route with
Show on chart (switches to the chart and fits the route) and Start
(begins navigation immediately).
The app asks for a rating — at the right moment
AnchorQueen no longer interrupts you at launch to ask for an App Store rating.
Instead, the standard iOS rating sheet may appear after a genuinely good
moment — an anchor watch you disarm after a calm, alarm-free stay, or a route
sailed all the way to its final waypoint. It shows at most once per app
version and never more than a handful of times a year, and iOS itself lets
you dismiss it with a tap. If something isn't working, skip the stars and
tell a human instead: Feedback & Support
reaches a real person who reads and replies.
Store fixes for returning subscribers
the plans again — previously an outdated account record could leave the
buy button stuck on "Pro Active" with no way to resubscribe.
your current plan are now translated in all 13 languages.
button reads Switch to Yearly / Switch to Monthly and the App Store
replaces the running subscription, never billing both.
from the flagship Jules AI model, and the token numbers shown always match
the live plan budgets.
Your plan's chart packs are claimable again
Pro and Max captains could see their included chart packs but not take them:
Include in my plan did nothing at all, and starting a download ended with
"Chart access could not be verified." The plan was real — the check that
authorises it was reading an account record that had not been filled in yet,
so a paid plan was being read as Free.
download as intended. Nothing about the allowance changed; only the check
behind it was wrong.
allows the same grace period after a billing date that the app already did,
so a renewal still being processed can't refuse a chart you've paid for.
store can no longer hide a live plan on the other.
declined — a lapsed plan, a signed-out account, no packs left — the reason
and the next step are on screen instead of a button that quietly does
nothing. If you have just subscribed or renewed, Restore Purchases in
the Store is the fix the message points you to.
had not reached Jules's daily message budget, which was still reading a paid
plan as Free — so a Pro captain could claim their chart packs and be metered
at the free allowance in the same session. Chart packs, Jules's budget and
the plan shown in the Store now all answer from one place. The older
Anchor Remote product remains a separate Remote subscription: it carries
one chart region while active, never Pro's three-pack allowance or its other
plan benefits.
Borders and maritime zones stay out of the way
Country borders and maritime-zone (EEZ) boundaries were drawn all the way to
harbour zoom, where the dashed magenta rings sat on top of the chart symbology
you actually navigate by — and their outlines are simplified, so up close they
drifted away from the real coastline.
wide-area zoom and disappear as you close in on an approach or a harbour.
panel and from the layer defaults. There is nothing left to turn off at
working zoom, so the toggles were only clutter — and captains who had
previously hidden them get the overview context back.
Chart symbols scale with your zoom again
Zoomed out to passage-planning scale, lighthouses, buoys, marinas, weather
pins and AIS vessels all drew at their full close-up size — a single
lighthouse could blanket half a gulf — and their name labels printed at full
size everywhere, burying the overview in text.
zoom-dependent size curve: compact at ocean scale, full size at
harbour-approach zoom. Major lights stay the most prominent, exactly as
paper-chart convention intends.
names now appear only once you are close enough for them to be useful,
instead of stacking at every zoom level.
You can now switch off usage analytics
Settings → Privacy gains a second switch, Usage Analytics, beside
Crash Reporting. Both are on by default and both take effect immediately.
What it sends is anonymous, aggregate use: which tabs you open, whether an
anchor watch was armed and roughly how long it ran, whether a route solved or
failed, whether a chart download finished. What it never sends is your
position, your boat, your name, your conversations with Jules, or anything you
typed — and continuous numbers like a swing radius or a passage length are
reported as ranges rather than exact values, so they can't identify a boat.
Switching it off stops collection and clears the identifiers already held on
the device. No feature depends on either switch.
See Settings — Privacy.
A buy button that tells you why it didn't work
Buying a chart region could fail silently. The most common cause was also the
least obvious: a purchase has to be attached to a captain account, so if you
were not signed in, the App Store sheet never opened — and nothing on screen
said so. The button simply appeared dead.
region's detail sheet, next to where a refused included pack already
reported its own reason.
Sign in to your captain account button that takes you straight there.
is refused, the detail sheet opens so the reason has somewhere to appear.
Nothing about what you can buy has changed: any plan, including Free, can
subscribe to any number of chart regions. The per-plan number (three on Pro)
counts the packs included with a plan, and has never limited what you can buy
outright.
See Store — if something goes wrong.
The app reopens where you left it
AnchorQueen used to open on the chart every single time, no matter what you
were doing when you closed it. Now it remembers.
nothing to resume, so it opens on the chart.
any other tab and it reopens there. The chart's sub-mode (Route /
Discover / Voyage) and SafeAnchor's screen (Anchor Watch / Radar) are
remembered too, alongside the Merconi and Capt's Notebook sub-modes that
already were.
you closed the app always reopens on SafeAnchor, and Start with
SafeAnchor (Settings → Safe Anchor → Launch) still lands every launch
on the Radar screen.
See Basic UI — where the app opens.
The app explains itself before it asks for your position
AnchorQueen used to ask for Always location the instant it launched, before
you had seen the chart — and, if you had ever declined, it opened with a dialog
pointing you at Settings. Both are gone.
is for — your boat on the chart, the swing circle, routes and voyages — and
only then does iOS ask. It asks for While Using the App, which is all the
chart ever needs.
nags, and nothing sends you to Settings.
now arrives when you drop the anchor and arm the watch — the one feature that
genuinely has to keep looking with the screen off.
instead of stacking on top of it, and the "location is off" alert only appears
while a watch is actually armed and blind.
See Getting started — grant the permissions
and Troubleshooting — permission prompts.
Background GPS now says what it costs
The anchor watch has always kept the GPS running with the screen off — that is
how it sees you drag at three in the morning. Now the app says so where you
switch it on.
later background escalation.
GPS can dramatically decrease battery life. It clears itself once the anchor
is set.
standing reminder naming exactly what keeps the GPS awake: an anchor watch, a
voyage recording, or active navigation. Nothing else does.
See SafeAnchor — Anchor Watch and
Troubleshooting — battery draining overnight.
Your regions are filed the same way everywhere
Settings → Installed Regions kept its own, older idea of which chart pack
belongs to which part of the world. It predated the Norway split and knew
nothing about the Mexico, Taiwan, US Inland, or World Coastline packs, so eight
of twenty regions landed in a catch-all Other Regions heading while the
Store filed the very same packs correctly.
Mediterranean, Northern Europe, United States, Mexico, Caribbean, Pacific,
East Asia, Worldwide.
place as the Store card's, so Norway SW/NE, the three Mexico packs, and
Taiwan stop showing up flagless.
translated in all thirteen languages.
(Norway, the single-zone Mediterranean, the old US coast packs) still
files under the right heading instead of dropping into Other.