Four iPhone fishing apps that earn their place in a tackle box.

Fishbrain is the only app on this list with a network effect. Every catch logged in the app — and there are tens of millions of them — adds a pin to a shared map, time-stamped and species-tagged, with the lure and rig the angler used. Open the map on a Saturday morning and you can see which species are running on which water right now, not what the regional fishing report said last Tuesday.

The Fish ID tool is the feature that justifies the install on its own. Point your camera at a fish on the deck, and the model identifies it from a library of 300+ sportfish with — per Fishbrain's own claim — 99% accuracy on the top five candidates. For anyone fishing unfamiliar water, that single feature replaces a battered field guide. The map layers go deeper from there: Navionics depth contours with point-and-read depth readouts, hotspot prediction, regulation overlays, and a 30-day filter on catch waypoints when you want to know what's been hitting this week. Most of that lives behind Fishbrain Pro — the free tier caps how many catch positions you see — but the upgrade is the cleanest one in the category.

Tides Near Me does one thing and starts in under a second. Open it, and the phone's location resolves to the nearest of more than 4,400 NOAA-and-equivalent tidal stations across the US, UK, Ireland, India, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. You see today's high and low tides, current direction and speed, and sun and moon timing on a single screen, with no carousel of upsells in the way.

The app is free for the core use case. A subscription extends the forecast window from seven days to thirty and removes ads, but anyone fishing the next morning's tide doesn't need either. What is worth paying attention to is the surface area the free tier already covers: a Home Screen widget that puts the next high or low tide on the lock screen, an Apple Watch app and complication that surfaces the same data on the wrist, and a 7-day "tidal extremes" panel that flags the most active weekend in the coming week. For shore-based and inshore fishing, that combination is the reason this app stays installed.

NOAA Marine Forecast & Weather is the app to keep when the wind is what's going to call the morning, not the bait. Tap anywhere on the map and you get NOAA's spot-specific point marine forecast — sky condition, wind speed and direction, wave height — pulled straight from the National Weather Service forecast grid. Coverage spans every NWS marine zone: East and West Coast, Great Lakes, Gulf of Mexico, Florida, Hawaii, Alaska, and Puerto Rico.

The interface is plainer than the consumer marine apps it competes with, and that's the appeal. Forecasts come from the same NWS grid the Coast Guard reads off, without the subscription-funnel chrome that wraps Windy or Buoycast. There's no premium tier dangling over the chart, no nag to upgrade for "extended range." For an angler making a launch-or-stay-home decision the night before, having the official forecast on a tap- anywhere map — instead of typing a zone name into weather.gov on a phone browser — is the entire pitch.

Solunar+ is the smallest app on this list and the one that takes the most explaining. It calculates daily solunar periods — major and minor windows derived from the moon's position relative to your location, plus the sun's rise and set — and rates each day on a five-fish scale. Open it before a trip and you see today's two major periods and two minor periods, the day's solunar score, moon phase, and sunrise/sunset, all on one screen.

Whether solunar theory actually predicts fish activity is a question anglers have argued for nearly a century, and the App Comrade desk has no horse in that race. What we'll say is that the app does what it says without theatre: clean date-picker, no ads in the foreground, no upsell carousel, and a small footprint on the home screen. For anyone who already plans by major/minor periods, it replaces the back-of-the-magazine solunar table the old way of checking required. For anyone who doesn't, treat it as a tiebreaker between two otherwise-equal mornings — not as gospel.

Pick two of these, not four. The social fisher who wants community signal and species ID pairs Fishbrain with Tides Near Me — the map tells you where, the tide chart tells you when. That's the most-used combination on the desk's phones and it covers most freshwater and inshore trips without a second thought.

Serious anglers heading offshore, or out before a weather window closes, add NOAA Marine Forecast & Weather and Solunar+ on top. NOAA tells you whether the ocean is going to let you fish at all; Solunar+ tells you which of two acceptable mornings is the better bet. Fishbrain still does the where, Tides Near Me still does the tide. The four together are the actual stack a serious dawn launch runs on.

None of these are substitutes for a chart plotter, a VHF radio, or the local bait-shop owner who's been on the water since 1991. They are what you reach for on a phone in the truck before the boat goes in.