Apple / sports / FISHBRAIN - FISHING APP
REVIEW
Fishbrain turned the fishing log into a social network.
A GPS-tagged catch log, a community feed, and a paywall that gates the maps you actually came for.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 11, 2026 · 4 MIN READ
Fishbrain’s pitch is that a fishing log is more useful when ten million other anglers are keeping one next to yours. Log a bass on a Tuesday evening in May, and the app knows the lure, the weather, the moon phase, the water temperature, and the exact pin — and so, eventually, does its forecasting model. The free tier is a personal diary with social proof. The paid tier is a map that has read every diary on the lake.
That tension — between a community app and a forecasting tool wearing the community as camouflage — is the whole Fishbrain experience. The Sweden-based team has spent more than a decade refining both halves, and the result is the closest thing the category has to a default. It is also the app most likely to make you wonder, mid-paywall, whether the fish were better off when nobody was logging them.
The free tier is a fishing diary with friends; Premium is the part that knows where the fish are.
FEATURES
Every catch you log gets a species, a weight, a method, a lure, and a GPS pin. Over time that log becomes the app's actual product — a personal record, a leaderboard against your friends, and a data point in the larger map of what's getting caught where. The feed is structured like Instagram: photos of fish, captions, likes, follows.
The map is where Premium earns its keep. Free users see a stripped-down version with public catch pins; Premium unlocks depth contours, BotCatch predictions that combine weather, season, and historical catches to suggest spots, and offline downloads for water you'll be on without signal. Weather, barometric pressure, moon phase, and tide tables sit one tap from any pin.
The catalogue covers most of North America and Europe with surprising granularity — small reservoirs and stocked ponds show up alongside the obvious destinations. Species ID from a photo works on common gamefish; it gets confused on baitfish and regional variants.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The log itself is the quiet win. Every catch is timestamped, geotagged, and tied to conditions you didn't have to enter — so a year in you can actually answer "what worked on this lake in May" without a spreadsheet.
The community is unusually civil for a free app with a feed. Most posts are real catches from real anglers; spam and bait-shop accounts get moderated quickly. Following a few locals on water you fish often turns out to be more useful than any guidebook.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
The paywall is aggressive in a way that makes the free tier feel like a demo. Depth maps, BotCatch, offline maps, and most species-specific forecasts are Premium-only, and the upsell prompts appear every few taps. Premium runs roughly $75–$80 a year depending on promotion — defensible if you fish new water, hard to justify if you fish the same three spots.
Catch privacy controls exist but the defaults still leak more than they should — a public catch with a precise pin on a small creek is exactly the post that brings the crowds. Battery drain with GPS logging on is real; a long day on the boat with the app foregrounded will eat a phone.
CONCLUSION
Install it free, log a season's worth of catches, and decide from there. If you mostly fish home water and have your spots dialed, the free tier is the whole app. If you travel for fishing or chase new species, Premium pays for itself on the first trip you don't blank. Skip it entirely if you'd rather your fishing stay off a server.