Apple / weather / TIDES NEAR ME
REVIEW
Tides Near Me turns NOAA's data dump into something you can read on a dock.
A free, ad-light tide chart that surfaces the right station and the right twelve hours without making you log in or pick a subscription tier.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 11, 2026 · 4 MIN READ
Tides Near Me
SHELTER ISLAND MAPPING COMPANY, LLC
OUR SCORE
7.6
APPLE
★ 4.8
PRICE
Free
A tide chart should not require a tutorial. Tides Near Me has known this for the entire decade it has been on the App Store, which is why the experience still ends roughly where it begins — open the app, glance at the curve, close the app. The next slack is in two hours and seventeen minutes; that is what you came for; goodbye.
What sits behind the curve is the same NOAA tide and current prediction the U.S. Coast Pilot uses, pulled directly from the agency’s public stations and stitched to your GPS. The developers’ decision was to do that one job — find the right station, draw the next twelve hours, do it before the phone goes back in the pocket — and refuse every adjacent feature that would dilute it. In an App Store where a flashlight wants a subscription, that restraint feels almost editorial.
The cost of the restraint is a U.S.-only map and a UI that has not changed much since the second Trump term. Both feel like fair trades.
It does one thing — read the next twelve hours of water at the closest NOAA station — and it does it before your thumb leaves the home screen.
FEATURES
Open the app and it geolocates you, picks the nearest NOAA tide and current station, and renders the next twelve hours as a smooth sine curve with the high and low times printed above and below. A drag handle scrubs along the curve so you can read predicted water height at any minute of the day. Pinch out and the chart expands to a week.
Stations are searchable by city, by ZIP, or by panning the built-in map, which dots every primary, subordinate, and current station NOAA publishes. Favorites pin to the home tab so a tournament weekend on three different ramps stays one tap each. Sunrise, sunset, and moon phase ride along under the curve, and current stations swap the tide curve for a flood/ebb arrow with peak flow times.
The app reads U.S. waters plus a handful of Pacific and Caribbean territories where NOAA maintains stations — no global coverage, no European, Australian, or Asian data. There is no account, no cloud sync, and no premium tier. A small banner ad sits below the chart on the free version; a one-time in-app purchase removes it.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The decision the developers got right was to stop at the dock. Tides Near Me is not trying to be a weather station, a fishing log, or a marine chart plotter. It is a tide chart, and the curve it draws is the same NOAA prediction every harbormaster reads — refreshed automatically, cached for offline once you've opened a station, and legible at arm's length in full sun.
The map view earns the install on its own. Most tide apps make you guess which station applies to your inlet; the map shows the nearest primary station, the subordinate stations that derive from it, and the current station at the channel mouth, all color-coded. For anyone who has tried to fish a tidal river without knowing which reading to trust, that visualization is worth more than another sub-screen of charts.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
The U.S.-only footprint is the obvious ceiling. Travel to Cornwall, Sydney, or Tofino and you're back to whatever the local harbor authority publishes on a PDF. The developers have never indicated international expansion is coming, and the NOAA data pipeline doesn't naturally extend to foreign hydrographic offices.
The visual design is also frozen somewhere around iOS 11. Charts read fine but the chrome — tab bar icons, the settings screen, the share sheet — has not been refreshed for Dynamic Island, Live Activities, or the iPad multitasking conventions that have arrived since. A tide is a perfect candidate for a Live Activity; today you still have to open the app to see the next slack.
CONCLUSION
Install it before your next coastal trip and forget you have it until the morning of. For U.S. anglers, sailors, surfers, and shellfish foragers, Tides Near Me is the fastest path from pocket to prediction, and the free tier is honest enough that the paid removal is a tip jar rather than a paywall. International users and anyone who wants a real chart plotter should keep looking — Navionics, Aye Tides, and the harbor-specific apps still have their lanes.