What's new in this release
The headline of this release is Real-Time Remote — live boat sharing with
the people who care where you are — plus a faster, smaller app and important
stability fixes.
The new Remote tab
AnchorQueen has a new top tab: 📡 Remote (tab #5, right after SafeAnchor).
Everything about sharing your boat live now lives in one place, with its own
violet "LIVE" look so you always know when something on screen is real-time.
boats on the open radar. No subscription needed.
two watchers — your partner ashore, the marina, a friend — with a simple
invite code. They see your live position, heading, and anchor status.
one chart, with a shared fleet board — roster, itinerary, and invite code.
follow it from your iPhone on the same account.
Full guide: Remote — live boat sharing and flotillas.
Drift alerts that reach the shore
When a boat you watch starts dragging its anchor, you get a push
notification the moment it happens — even with the phone locked, even miles
away. One alert per event, not a storm. The alarm no longer sounds only in the
cockpit; it reaches the people off the boat too.
Alarms that pierce mute and Do Not Disturb
The anchor-drag and man-overboard alarms are now delivered as Apple
Critical Alerts: they sound at your chosen volume even when the phone is
muted, the ringer is turned down, or a Focus/Sleep mode is on. iOS asks for
the permission the first time you arm a watch; you can review it any time in
Settings → Notifications → AnchorQueen → Critical Alerts. The shallow-water
(grounding) alarm is visual only — a red on-screen banner, no sound.
See the SafeAnchor guide and
Real-Time Remote subscription
Remote's paid features are available two ways: bundled with Pro and
Max, or as the standalone Real-Time Remote yearly subscription in the
Store — full remote watching without a full plan. The free Live
Beacon stays free either way.
The chart now suggests its own downloads
A new Charts button (map icon) lives in the chart's right-edge column.
It watches where you are looking and where your boat is, and pulses when
something needs attention — tap it for a short list: the region for the area
on screen, the region for your GPS position when that differs, the free
worldwide base map (listed first until you install it — on a fresh install a
small bubble also appears next to the button for a few seconds to point you
at it), plus a renewal notice when the
covering chart's subscription has expired and an update notice when a
newer edition is out. The renewal notice carries an inline Renew button
— re-subscribing is one tap from the chart. Everything else lands you in
the Store. The old one-time "download a chart" banner
is gone; chart discovery now stays with you after the first download. See
Chart downloads for this area.
An expired chart, by the way, stays on screen — it keeps rendering
while route planning and starting navigation over it politely refuse with
the same renew prompt. See
When a chart subscription expires.
Fresh installs also start smarter: the very first launch opens on the
OpenStreetMap base map, so land and coastlines are visible everywhere
before you download anything. Install your first chart pack — the free
worldwide base map counts — and the app switches once to the Nautica Day
nautical chart. Pick a base map yourself at any point and that choice always
wins. See Choosing the chart style.
One panel to rule them all
Every floating legend panel on the chart — harbours, buoys, lights, wrecks,
AIS, marine life, dive sites, captain's marks, and friends — now shares the
same card: one header style with the panel's icon, a live count badge,
and consistent minimize (–) / close (✕) buttons. Drag the header to move
a panel (it can no longer be lost off-screen), and use the new corner grip
to resize it — the list grows to fill the space. Your layout is remembered
per panel, separately for portrait and landscape. See
A calmer, safer route planner
Planning and editing routes got a full pass:
one hides every other route until you finish — or dims them to faint
context lines if you prefer (chart layers → Dim Routes While Editing).
an individual saved route, now clears it from the chart completely — planned
routes are no longer redrawn behind your back, so the chart stays clean.
when the water is shallower than your draft plus safety margin and red
when it's shallower than your draft — before the route is even planned.
And the check is tide-aware: each leg is judged at the time you'll
actually be there, using the predicted tide for your departure time and
planned speed.
drag to reorder, rename, delete, or insert a point on any leg.
handles to insert a point; a live depth readout follows your finger
while dragging; and the edit capsule now has undo / redo — with Cancel
restoring the route exactly as you found it.
Direction and Duplicate.
waypoint now shows its details in a card that floats right next to the
point (flipping above/below and clamping to the screen so it never covers
the pin, and tracking it as you pan/zoom) instead of a fixed corner box.
When the route's weather is loaded, the card also shows the wave height
and wind gust forecast for that waypoint's arrival time.
named places to the endpoints.
Full guide: Chart — planning a route.
Faster first open, smaller app
The chart's country borders, place names, and maritime-zone boundaries now
load from a compact binary format instead of very large text files. The app
download is significantly smaller, and the first chart render after install
no longer pauses to parse them.
Stability fixes
backgrounding it during an active chart pan.
ordering, notification cleanup).
water level (awash / covers-and-uncovers / always above water) instead of
always the generic "depth not stated" symbol.
Merconi: everything on, instantly
The Merconi tab now lights up marine-life pins, dive
sites, and ocean-data points the moment you enter — no layer toggles to
hunt for. The Global Fishing Watch effort heatmap is bound to the
Fishing lens: pick the Fishing pill to see it, and it hides on the other
lenses (it's a heavy overlay, so it stays out of the way until you want it).
The Diving / Discover / Fishing pills act as lenses on the same chart. Leave
the tab and everything switches off again, so exploration overlays never
clutter your navigation charts. Opening Merconi keeps your current chart
view — it no longer zooms the camera out on you.
You can see who's at anchor
Anchored and moored ships on the chart used to be marked with a
faint ring around the hull and a tiny anchor badge in the corner — hard to
read at a glance, and it hid the vessel underneath. Now they're drawn with
their ground tackle: a red anchor point ahead of the bow, the line running
back to the ship, and a lit anchor light. You can tell an anchored vessel
from one under way instantly, see roughly where its anchor lies, and — since
the tackle swings with the ship's heading — read which way it's lying to wind
or tide before you pick your own spot.
Build a passage straight off the chart
Route mode now has the flow it was always missing. The Command Rail on the
left edge carries Drop DEP, Drop ARR, and Add Waypoint: tap a
command, then tap the chart where you want the point. A banner tells you what
the chart is waiting for, the departure and arrival draw as clearly labelled
DEP and ARR markers, and every via-point is numbered by the leg it
closes.
Drop your departure and the rail arms the arrival for you — one press per
point, never two — so an A→B passage is two taps on the chart.
Add Waypoint stays armed, so a four-leg passage is four taps — no going
back to the button between them. Each new point re-plans the passage through
the same depth-aware engine, leg by leg, and a point dropped on land is
refused rather than quietly producing a route you can't sail.
See Route.
The Command Rail: only what you can use
The route commands used to sit in one tall column with half of them greyed
out. Now the rail shows only the commands that are live right now — a blank
chart offers three (Drop DEP, Drop ARR, Routes), and Reverse, Clear, Save Route
and Add Waypoint arrive as your plan earns them. It gives the chart back most
of a screen's height.
Drag it open when you want words. Collapsed it's a narrow column of icons;
drag it sideways — grab it anywhere, the small pill on its right edge shows
where — and it widens to show each command's name. It remembers how you left
it. A three-dot DEP → VIA → ARR stepper at the top tracks the plan.
Dropping a point now lands with a ripple in that command's colour, moving an
endpoint slides it rather than jumping, a finished route draws itself
from departure to arrival, and the distance and time count up to their new
values. See Route.
Every mode shows only its own commands
The chart's three modes no longer share one crowded control set:
Clear, Save, Routes.
Course Up (chart turns to your heading) and Follow Vessel.
Nothing irrelevant to what you're doing is on screen. See
Discover tells you what it found
After the exploration layers load, a strip above the mode pills reports what
is actually in view — "23 dive sites · 8 wrecks · 4 harbours" — and updates as
you pan. Tap any count to open the list behind it. If a layer is on but the
water is empty, it says so and tells you what to do: *"No dive sites in this
area — pan wider."* See Discover.
Log your catches and your berths
Merconi can now hold your own records. Press and hold
the chart and choose Log Catch or Berth Photo: attach several
photos at once, a short title, and a note. The entry pins to the spot and
time you made it, and tapping the pin opens a swipeable photo gallery.
Handy for remembering which berth in a crowded marina was the sheltered one,
or where the fish actually were. Everything stays on your device — nothing is
uploaded or shared.
The hold gesture is quicker
The press-and-hold ring on the chart now fills in 450 ms instead of 800 ms.
The same deliberate gesture, roughly half the wait — with the haptic ramp
retimed to match.
Jules's AI Engine screen, rebuilt
The Local Engine item in Jules's + menu is now AI Engine, and the
screen behind it was rebuilt around one question: *what is Jules using right
now, and what does it cost me?*
forced engine wasn't reachable and something else took over.
folds into a collapsed Advanced section.
(Apple Intelligence) and your own Ollama server carry a FREE badge for
Free, PRO and MAX captains alike.
budget runs out, Jules keeps answering for free on a local engine —
the limit banner says so and the input stays unlocked. Chart tools and
image questions still wait for the daily reset.
numbered steps while it can't reach your Mac, a list of installed
models to pick from, and a download card with a progress bar.
screen — and reads On-device, Ollama or Cloud, with a FREE
marker when the free lane is in use.
Also improved
species pin and the detail sheet leads with a photo and a short
description, plus Wikipedia / FishBase / WoRMS links that open right
inside the app. Each row in the Marine Life legend shows a thumbnail, and a
target button on the row flies the chart straight to that sighting.
waypoint pin on a Discover info card (seamarks, harbours, dive spots, reefs,
marine life) is now a labelled button so it reads at a glance. Shore
facilities like dive centres — which aren't navigable points — no longer
offer it; a Captain's Mark still bookmarks them. Harbours gained the
waypoint action they were missing.
Merconi sighting now renders as its own species pin —
when a survey station reports many species at one spot, the pins fan
out in a small spiral so each stays visible and tappable, and they now
appear from much wider zooms.
they now gather into a violet count bubble at overview zooms and spread
into individual pins as you zoom in, with titles appearing only when
legible — and the richer article wins when two compete for the same spot.
See Discover.
trip that takes several steps at once — look up two places, plan the route,
then move the chart to show you — and he no longer stops partway through on
the busiest requests.
option that permanently removes your account and its data. See
numbering across the manual reflects the new tab.
classic Radar screen while you scrub the forecast — same colours,
same hexagon toggle as the anchor chart.
unlocking it draws a dashed ring with arrows around the anchor pin so you
can see at a glance that it's draggable. See
simulated vessel — the boat stays clearly visible.
(under the crosshair and ruler): hide or show the double-circle position
marker, course predictor and heading ruler with one tap.
feed's provider goes down at its end, the chart now says so instead of
retrying in the background all day — and if you have VesselAPI configured
it fails over to it automatically. See Chart.