Anchor AlarmAnchorQueen · v2.4.2
What's new in AnchorQueen 2.4.2
A Store-and-charts release. Everything here is about the app agreeing with
itself: the plan you pay for is the plan every screen reads, the chart regions
you browse open their own cruising guide, and a Remote subscription stays
visible once you own it.
A plan bought on Android is now a plan on your iPhone
If your subscription was bought through Google Play, parts of the iPhone app
were only looking at what this device had purchased — which is nothing — and
quietly treated you as Free while the Store itself correctly
showed your plan as active.
three filled chart-pack folios above the words "0 / 3 claimed" while the
button beneath them read Pro Active. The locker now counts your real
claims.
route-weather strip and its series tabs, the plan badge in the sidebar, and
Jules's upgrade rows all read the same plan the Store does.
already open no longer waits for a restart to unlock anything.
Google Play" notice and its disabled buttons now appear only while a Google
Play plan is genuinely live — the case where you could be billed twice. Once
it has expired, the plans on the Store are yours to buy again.
Chart regions now open their own cruising guide from the list
Every region card in the Store's Charts section can now
be tapped to open its detail sheet — the coverage map, the tagline, popular
destinations and FAQ that were previously only reachable by tapping the
region-picker map. If you always browse in the default List view, this
content was effectively hidden from you before.
any download or price button keep their own separate taps, so managing a
region never fights with browsing it.
next to the size badge, so you can compare cruising ground before opening a
card.
coverage map, and the header icon on Key Cruising Harbours in the detail
sheet.
See Store — Charts.
Real-Time Remote stays visible after you buy it
If you were on Pro or Max and separately subscribed to standalone
Real-Time Remote, the Store used to show no Remote card at all once you
were on a plan — no status, no renewal date, and no way back to it.
subscription outright, and on Pro or Max it shows Remote Active with its
own renewal date and no purchase button.
your Remote subscription is active, the card shows your status and renewal
date without a price instead of disappearing.
Ledger](captain.html#licenses-ledger) now states "Real-Time Remote also
active ·
Live AIS traffic can now run on a key of your own
Live ship traffic reaches AnchorQueen through aisstream.io, over a key
built into the app and shared by every copy of it. aisstream.io limits how
many boats may be connected on one key at a time, so when the shared key is
busy the service turns new connections away — and vessels simply never appear.
Registering at aisstream.io is free; paste the key, tap Use this key, and
the chart reconnects straight away with capacity nobody else is sharing.
key exactly as it did before.
at capacity the AIS row reads Shared key full instead of a vague
connection error, and stops retrying a connection that cannot succeed.
AnchorQueen, and not carried in an iCloud backup.
connection the chart could drop the AIS feed moments after picking it up,
then reconnect in a loop — the app was taking slightly too long to tell
aisstream.io what stretch of sea to watch, and the service hung up while it
waited. It now speaks up immediately on a new connection, and only paces
itself when it is changing the area as you pan. A pan during that pause
also no longer leaves the chart listening to the water you just left.
Replay any recorded passage — your boat, that day
Every passage you record already holds the whole story: position, speed
over ground, and heading, fix by fix, on the real clock. New in this
release, ▶ Replay plays that story back on the chart — from the
passage's row or detail page in the Captain's Library, the saved-routes
list on the chart, a search result, or the daily report in the Captain's
Log.
translucent planning ghost — turning with the heading you actually
steered, a fading trail behind it and a white dashed line marching
ahead over the part of the passage still to come.
the wall-clock time at the cursor, and elapsed / remaining time.
(1×–256×) scale the recorded clock, so the replay slows where you
slowed and runs where you ran — a lull at anchor reads as a lull.
chart and it's yours again. Scrub the timeline exactly as in
Voyage mode.
See Replaying a passage.
Waypoint details now appear when you ask — and follow your finger
Route waypoints used to stack their full info boxes on the chart at high
zoom — several dark panels covering the very water you were inspecting.
one detail card is ever open, and a tap on open water dismisses it.
laid out in the order a captain reads them, with wave and gust at the
waypoint's ETA when route weather is loaded.
while you pan and zoom.
and ETA tick from your live speed and position, and the next waypoint
wears a NEXT badge. On a recorded passage the card shows the
recorded facts instead — the time you passed the fix, and the speed and
heading you actually held.
card together with the panel.
See Waypoint details — tap to reveal.
Routes and passages, told apart everywhere
Lists that mix planned routes with recorded passages — the base-route
picker for passage plans and the available-routes panel on the chart —
now carry an All / Routes / Passages filter that remembers your
choice, and command-palette search results label each entry Route or
Passage.
Your passages now read like a watch log
Choosing Passages in the route panel no longer gives you a flat list of
names. Passages are grouped into days, newest first, with Today called
out and the weekday and date written the way your language writes them.
from the passage's first recorded position, so importing or saving a
passage later never moves it out of the day you sailed it.
their own column, then the distance run and the time it took, in your
units.
Duplicate remain in its menu. Planned routes and the All view keep the
compact rows you already know.
See Captain's Library.
Closing the route panel no longer throws away the route
The route panel now has two ways out, and they mean different things:
Minimize keeps the route selected behind the R control, while the new
✕ clears the chart back to Saved Routes without deleting anything.
The build controls beside them only offer the edit that makes sense next:
nothing placed yet offers DEP and ARR; one endpoint placed offers the
missing endpoint and Clear; a finished route you can still edit offers
Add Waypoint and Reverse. A recorded passage, or a route you are
actively navigating, shows no edit controls at all — those are records, not
drafts. Starting guidance also puts down any point you had armed for
placement.
Browsing and saving lost their duplicate buttons: the R control owns
browsing, and a route that solves is already saved.
See Chart — Route mode.
The chart got quieter, and replays got weather
A round of refinements straight from on-the-water testing:
AnchorQueen quietly samples the wind — from your instruments' true wind
when connected, otherwise the live forecast — and the replay deck plays
it back at the right moment, gusts and direction needle included.
Passages recorded before this version show a dash.
in the Voyage sub-mode, where they belong — though STOP always stays on
screen while you're actually navigating. The simulator button is gone
from release builds entirely.
All / Routes / Passages filter as everywhere else, right in the chart's
route panel, with Replay on passage rows.
now a date-and-time timesheet: newest sailing day first, Today called
out, exact departure and arrival clocks aligned down the left, and distance
plus elapsed time on every row. Replay, locate and visibility remain one tap
away.
row, locate flies the chart to the track's first fix instead of a wide
fit of the whole line — and a nameplate at that start position shows
the name and dates, so a berth shared by several departures still reads
unambiguously.
orange SIM chip: one tap starts Simulator Mode with that route
pre-selected — the simulated vessel drops at the start and the autopilot
sails it at the planned speed, with the route panel tucked behind its
R button so the chart is clear to watch.
itself when selected, other routes step aside until you deselect, and a
route under active navigation never disappears.
non-destructive ✕ beside Minimize: ✕ returns to Saved Routes, while
Minimize keeps the selection parked behind the R button. The Command
Rail now follows the actual build state — missing endpoint first, geometry
edits only after both endpoints exist, and no edit commands for recorded
passages or a route already under guidance.
scrub by hand — cinematic playback is silent in the hand at any speed.
button on the A slot fills it with your live GPS coordinates, confirms
with a checkmark, and steps you on to choosing the arrival by itself a
moment later. The unlabeled arrow that used to sit in the Saved Routes
header is gone.
card's ▶ Replay from here starts the passage replay playing from
that exact moment.
The boat now starts its own log
The best passages were the ones nobody remembered to record. AnchorQueen
now watches how the boat is actually moving — position plus the phone's
motion sensors, on a slow 30-second cycle — and starts the passage
recording by itself once you are underway at sea.
simply making way above 2 knots, with your position on water and not on
land, and recording begins — the same recording the REC button
starts, with the same track and the same statistics.
watch's swing circle and the recording starts immediately, without waiting
out the second cycle — even if the app was force-quit at the mooring.
been collected, Passage recording started rises from the bottom of the
chart with Set destination — Voyage mode, press and hold, and live
guidance runs on top of the recording already in progress — or Dismiss,
which leaves it recording quietly. The Discover long-press menu carries the
same Set destination while a recording runs, so you can choose a
destination hours into the passage.
passage stops and saves itself into the [Captain's
Library](chart.html#captains-library) — Passages filter, ▶ Replay and
all — while the ship's-log voyage closes with its arrival entry.
sea (on by default) now governs both this and the older
navigation-triggered recording. The separate Auto-record voyages switch
is gone; if you had turned it off, the merged switch starts off too.
auto-stopped, nothing auto-starts while you are already navigating, and
after you stop a recording yourself the automation stands down for a while.
See Automatic passage recording.
The daily voyage report now follows the ship, not the phone
Jules's noon report used to arrive every day your phone had seen the sky —
including weeks spent entirely ashore, narrating a voyage that wasn't
happening. The report now follows the ship's log, not the phone's
whereabouts.
covered in the last day, a log entry in your own hand, or an open voyage. A
quiet day at anchor mid-cruise still gets its position report; a day at home
gets nothing.
voyage report: During voyages (the default), Every day, or
Off. A separate Report notification switch lets the report file
itself into the log silently, without a push.
observation is recorded while a voyage is under way or the anchor watch is
armed — never for a day the boat spent without you.
into the log could count as "activity" and keep the reports coming forever;
that loop is closed.
report — now including engine hours and whether the wind built or
eased over the day. A day at anchor gets a short conditions note
instead of a padded essay: a quiet day is allowed to read quiet.
＋ menu — lists every daily report ever filed in your log, newest
first, offline, with the full narrative and the frozen figures behind
each day. It replaces Recent Briefings, which could only show the last
five reports and needed a connection.
Tapping the daily report notification opens the report
If the app was closed when the noon report arrived — which is the usual
case — tapping the notification opened the app on whatever tab you left it on
and showed you nothing. The report was never lost, but you had to go and find
it yourself.
Notebook, Logbook side, with the report on screen — after the launch
animation, not underneath it.
still opens on top of it; an armed watch is never pushed aside for a digest.
reappear.
"Nothing happened" is no longer an answer
Route planning needs the depth data that lives inside a chart region. Ask for
a course over water no installed region covers — a fresh install, or a passage
into a sea you haven't bought yet — and the app used to answer with developer
shorthand, or with nothing at all: Auto Route simply did not respond.
area — download a chart region to plan routes"*, with a Get Charts
button that opens the Store's chart regions.
in Voyage mode, and dragging a leg of an existing route.
seconds; this one stays until you tap Get Charts or dismiss it, because
tapping it is the whole point.
this chart region" and "Chart region couldn't be opened"* replace the
filenames and decoder messages that used to appear under a region's row in
Settings — both mean reinstall this region.
See When no chart region covers this water.
Route plans leave the folder system
Route plans are voyage documents — each one is anchored to the route it was
built from and lives in its own chronological list. Filing them into library
folders never earned its keep: a plan filed on one device could not appear in
the same folder on another, and the folder screens duplicated what the
Route Plans list already shows.
every plan in Library → Route Plans, newest first.
decision on the way to a passage plan.
and notes; they simply all live in the Route Plans list now. Folders keep
organising waypoints and routes exactly as before.
Landscape gets a proper cockpit layout
Turning the phone sideways used to cost you the menu. Landscape is now a
first-class layout:
toggle work identically in portrait and landscape — the menu no longer
teleports into the right side panel when you rotate. (iPad landscape keeps
the roomier panel-hosted menu.) The right side panel still hosts feature
details, the route planner, and the simulator console in landscape.
See Menu in the side panel. The chart's own
controls were rebuilt later in this cycle — see
[Bridge Rails](#bridge-rails) for how they work now.
Bridge Rails — the chart chrome moves to the edges
Landscape exposed what portrait had been hiding: three floating groups
fighting over the same corners. They are now two rails, one glass plate
per vertical edge — right under your thumbs where you already hold the phone.
navigation, safety, tools. STOP, MOB and REC hold fixed slots that never
move and never hide, whatever mode you are in — and zoom and recenter are
never hidden either. Whatever the screen can't hold goes into a •••
pocket that opens as a two-column grid.
cell per category. Tapping one opens a single panel beside the rail
instead of a stack of floating cards you had to dig through.
the chart back to the chart.
swap the two rails' sides for whichever hand is free at the helm.
Long-press for Reset layout and Swap sides. The collapse chevron and the
dock swap are retired — the rails size themselves, and your old arrangement
is carried over.
See The chart command rail and
Your boat's dimensions are one set of numbers again
AnchorQueen was keeping the vessel you set up in
Settings → Nav → Vessel Profile in two places at once,
and the two disagreed. Changing your draft there reached route planning and
the red shallow-sounding threshold — but never the
shallow-water alarm, the size of your boat on
the chart, or the swing circle the quick anchor drop used. Those read the
other copy, and no amount of restarting brought them together.
uses it — routing, sounding colours, the shallow-water alarm, your boat's
icon, and anchor swing.
be silently rolled back later in the same session — most easily by opening
Simulator Mode and rerolling the ghost name.
timestamp, so Backup & Sync treated them as older than whatever was
already in the cloud and never sent them up. They now sync like everything
else.
you changed it; the button implied otherwise.
Nothing is lost in the move: if the two copies disagree on your device, the
one you last edited in Settings is the one kept.
The navigation HUD gets a second size — and moves where you want it
The card at the top of the chart while you navigate showed one section at a
time and sat where it was put. It now has two sizes, set from the pair of
buttons in its header and remembered between voyages.
the next turn, the destination, your bearing · distance · speed and the
cross-track bar are on screen at once, beside one detail pane you pick
between Route, Charts and Vision.
each. Tap one to make it your target.
bottom edge; double-tap the grabber for the default height.
detail pane on the right — so the extra width goes to the graphs and the
3-D view instead of stretching the digits.
your helm position and double-tap it to snap back — the same handling as
the GPS card. Its buttons, graphs and the Vision view keep working while
you drag.
Vision pulls back, and your track appears behind the boat
The 3-D Vision view watched the water from just above the transom. That
put the camera so low that there was no room on screen for anything behind
the boat: your own track — the speed-coloured line the view is supposed to
show you — had barely a boat length of water to be drawn in, so in practice
it never appeared.
The camera now sits higher and further back, the way a drone following
the boat would, and roughly 200 m of your track streams out astern in
full speed colour: cool where you were slow, warm where you were making way.
A turn now reads at a glance.
Two things improved with it: the guidance corridor no longer floods the whole
foreground, and nearby traffic finally grows and shrinks with range
instead of every vessel drawing the same size.
A passage held at a steady speed also draws in a clear mid-scale colour now
rather than the darkest one on the scale.
Vision in a replay now follows the passage
The Vision viewport in the passage-replay deck drew the guidance lane,
your boat and the SOG for the moment you switched it on — and then stayed
there. Scrubbing, fast-forwarding, playing at 64×: the numbers on the deck
below moved, the lane markings kept flowing, but the boat and the water ahead
of it never left the position where the view first appeared. It looked live,
which is why it was easy to miss.
The viewport now re-reads the scrub cursor ten times a second, so it tracks
the passage wherever you take it — playing, dragging the scrubber, or jumping
straight to the far end — and shows the speed the boat was actually making at
that point.
See Replaying a passage.
The boats in Vision are boats now
Vision is a view from behind and above your boat, but everything floating in
it was drawn as a flat plan symbol — the shape you would see from a
helicopter directly overhead, pasted onto a sea drawn in perspective. It read
as a sticker on the water, and every contact looked like the same generic
hull.
Your boat and every AIS vessel are now three-dimensional, rendered from
the same angle the camera actually looks from:
tanker its deck manifold and tank domes, a cruise ship its tiered decks and
lit windows, a fishing boat its wheelhouse and net reel, a yacht its mast
and sails. Cargo ships are drawn at their real class — a coaster with deck
cranes is not the same drawing as a 400 m box ship.
manoeuvres, so crossing traffic is obvious before you read a number.
profile, and it grows and turns as you walk the camera round it.
an amber or red wash plus a ring, instead of being flooded to a solid
coloured blob — a close ship still looks like the ship it is.
whiskers, and each hull now sits in the sea with a shadow under it.
Route mode stops asking
Planning a passage had a step that shouldn't have existed: after placing your
points you still had to press Auto to get a route. You don't any more. Drop
a departure, drop an arrival, and the passage plans itself — as it always
should have.
Every point after that extends the route: tap Add Waypoint, tap the
chart, and the passage carries on to the new point. Only that new leg is
planned. The water you already looked at and accepted behind you stays exactly
as it was, instead of the whole route being torn up and re-solved for a change
you made at its far end. On a long passage that is the difference between a
moment and a wait.
Your plan saves itself. There is no Save button to forget. A route with two
points is on the boat's database from that moment, and it keeps up with every
change. Come back tomorrow and it is there. Deleting is now the deliberate act
— the 🗑 on the rail, or a swipe in the library.
Every point knows where it is, immediately. A waypoint is labelled with the
nearest bay, town, or sea area the instant it lands — no network, no waiting.
The route names itself from its two ends ("Yalıkavak → Güllük"), and a plan
you haven't finished still reads as somewhere ("Yalıkavak · 13 Aug") rather
than "New Route". A hop that starts and ends in the same place is named for
that place instead of repeating it, and a very long marina name is shortened at
a word break so the title stays on one line. Type your own name over any of it
and it is never touched again.
The Route Panel comes back when you place a point. If you had tucked the
panel away behind its R button, dropping a departure — or any other point —
brings it straight back up, showing the place name, the coordinates and the
running distance. Planning is a conversation with the boat; you should never
place a point and have to go looking for what it did.
Tap a route on the chart to open it. Any route or recorded passage drawn in
Route mode is tappable. Touch the line, and it is selected with its details
open — no hunting for its row in the list.
NAV moved to the top. The green NAV button now sits beside the route's
name in the panel header, at every panel height, and does the whole set-up in
one press: the route is saved, guidance starts on the leg nearest your boat
rather than blindly at the first one, and the camera follows the vessel.
Finally, the route-editing controls — confirm, undo, redo, cancel, delete —
moved off the right edge of the chart and onto the Command Rail on the
left, under the commands that built the route. Finishing an edit no longer
means crossing the screen.
See Route.
The Ship's Journal fills the screen
The Logbook's floating window now has Maximize. It opens a full-screen
reading desk without losing the ship's day under your cursor, and closing it
returns you to the same place in the floating log. Jules → ＋ → Ship's
Journal opens that same desk directly.
Each ship's day now reads as one record: a 24-hour wake of the day's ledger
marks, Jules' daily report, the official entry lines, and the recorded passages
connected to the day. A replayable passage has Replay beside it; the Journal
closes, returns to the chart and loads the passage paused. Overnight passages
appear on both days they cross, and a day with several recordings keeps them
separate so you choose the right one.
The desk is now ready for debriefs and inspections too. Quick scopes and a
full filter sheet narrow the day by text, author, category, event type or
voyage without changing the append-only record. Tap a line to inspect its
linked position, weather, alarm and confirmed route-change evidence, or start
a matched passage replay at the nearest recorded fix. Per-entry bookmarks stay
local and out of official exports; the Journal's Export menu shares the open
ship's day as PDF or CSV.
Photographs that count as evidence
An entry can now carry up to four photos — the damage, the fouled anchor, the
stamp, the sea you are describing in the line. They behave like the log
itself rather than like a photo album.
The original file is copied into the Journal untouched, and the entry records
its fingerprint. The Journal shows the picture only while the stored bytes
still match what the line recorded; anything else is reported rather than
drawn. Like every line in the log the attachment is permanent — remove a
photo before you save or it stays, and a mistake is corrected the way every
other logbook mistake is, with a new line.
Photos stay on the device that took them and are never uploaded, so an entry
that reached your other phone by sync arrives without its pictures and says
so.
A day's log, sealed for an inspector
Export Inspection Packet (.zip) puts one ship's day into a single file
for a surveyor, an insurer, a port state inspector or a charter dispute: the
day as PDF and CSV, every photo those entries reference, a manifest listing
each line with its own fingerprint, and a signature over that manifest from a
key held in this device's keychain.
Anyone receiving it can verify that nothing — not a character of the log, not
a pixel of a photo — changed after the packet was made. It proves the packet
is unaltered since this device produced it; it is not a notarisation and does
not assert who you are. Because the photos never leave the device that took
them, the packet must be exported there — an export that cannot reach the
day's evidence stops and says so instead of quietly leaving photos out.
Automatic reroutes are also more precise in the permanent record. A route
change is filed only after you accept it and that exact replacement is active.
A suggestion, failed route calculation, ordinary edit, rejection or failed
activation writes nothing.
See The ship's logbook.
Counting the captains we could never see
Most people who install AnchorQueen never create an account, and until now the
app had no way to know anything about them at all — not how many there were,
not which features they relied on. That made it impossible to prioritise work
around the people actually using the app.
This release gives each device an anonymous record of its own. It is created
the first time you do something worth remembering — arming an anchor watch,
opening the Store — never merely by opening the app. It holds the app version,
your device model, your language and your plan; it never holds your position,
your boat, your name or your email.
If you later create an account, that record becomes yours rather than being
discarded, so everything you did before signing up stays attached to you. The
Usage Analytics switch in Settings → Privacy governs it exactly as it
governs everything else: with it off, no record is created.
See Privacy.
Signing up from the sidebar works again
Tapping Sign In on the captain card at the top of the sidebar opened a
sheet that span forever. Nothing was loading — the sheet was showing the
signed-in dashboard, which has nothing to draw without an account, and it had
no way back except a swipe. On an iPhone that card is the main route to
creating an account, so the whole sign-up path was closed from the chart.
The card now opens the ordinary sign-in screen, with a ✕ to close it, and
turns into your dashboard the moment you are signed in.
See Captain — signed out.
Meteo now shows the clock you're reading
Every time in the Meteo tab was drawn in UTC: forecast hours, the hourly
carousel, day separators on the Meteogram, tide markers, and the day/night
weather icons. Three hours behind in Turkey, five ahead of New York — the
forecast values themselves were always right, only the clock labels beside
them were not.
Times now follow your device's time zone throughout the tab, including saved
weather pins and the forecast panel on the live
weather map.