Apple / sports / SOLUNAR+
REVIEW
Solunar+ sells folklore as a forecast, but the interface earns its keep.
A clean iPhone reader for the solunar tables anglers and hunters have argued over for ninety years. The science is thin; the app, less so.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 11, 2026 · 3 MIN READ
Every angler eventually meets the solunar table — the four-window daily chart that promises to tell you when the fish will bite based on where the moon is. John Alden Knight invented it in 1926, every outdoor magazine has run it for a century, and roughly nobody can agree on whether it actually works. Solunar+ is a clean, single-purpose iPhone app for people who long ago stopped caring about the debate and just want a nice version of the chart in their pocket.
The app’s job, in fairness, isn’t to prove the theory works. It’s to render a prediction your grandfather already trusted, on a screen he didn’t have, with the moon phase pulled in real time and the sunrise correct for your actual GPS coordinates. On that brief, Solunar+ delivers. Whether the prediction means anything once you’re on the water is the older question — one the app politely declines to answer.
The app's job isn't to prove the theory works. It's to render a prediction your grandfather already trusted.
FEATURES
Solunar+ plots major and minor feeding periods for any date and location, drawn from the standard solunar table — the lunar-cycle-based prediction John Alden Knight published in 1926 and which every fishing magazine has reprinted since. Pick a spot, scrub a date, and the app returns four daily windows ranked from poor to excellent, with sunrise, sunset, moonrise, moonset, and moon phase stacked beside them.
Location handling is the most thought-out part. You can save multiple spots — a home lake, a hunting lease, a coastal flat — and switch between them without retyping coordinates. The seven-day forecast shows ratings as a color-coded grid, which makes "should I take Thursday off work" a glance instead of a calculation.
No ads. No account. No social feed. Pricing is a one-time unlock for the full forecast range, with the current day available free.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The display is the win. Most solunar apps shipping today are reskinned 2014 utilities with banner ads stacked above the tide times. Solunar+ uses native iOS type, gives the moon phase real estate, and respects that the user already knows what they're looking at.
The offline behavior is also right. Once a location is saved the forecast renders without a signal, which is the whole point — cell coverage on a stock pond at 5am is a coin flip. Sunrise, sunset, and moon data are astronomical calculations, not API calls, so the app doesn't degrade when your phone is in airplane mode in a tree stand.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
The honest caveat is the theory itself. The solunar hypothesis — that fish and game feed harder around lunar transits — has been around since 1926 and the peer-reviewed evidence remains modest at best. Studies in fisheries journals have found weak correlations at some sites and none at others, and effects from weather, water temperature, barometric pressure, and forage activity routinely swamp any lunar signal. Solunar+ presents its ratings as if the forecast were a tide chart, when it's closer to an astrology column for sportsmen. The app would be more trustworthy with a single sentence explaining what the rating actually represents.
Beyond the epistemology, the feature set is thin compared to apps that fold solunar data into a broader picture. There's no barometric pressure trend, no water temperature overlay, no wind forecast, no integration with NOAA tides for saltwater users. Fishbrain, Anglr, and the older Solunar Forecast by Vinson Software all do more — Solunar+ wins on look, not coverage.
CONCLUSION
Get Solunar+ if you already keep a solunar table in your tackle box and you want the cleanest iPhone version of the same idea. Skip it if you want a forecast that accounts for what actually moves fish — pressure, water, weather. And if you're new to the theory, read a fisheries-biology paper before you build a Thursday around what the moon is doing.