VesselSOS turns your iPhone into a live boat tracker. The people ashore follow your position, speed, course and battery in an ordinary browser link, with no app and no account. Tracking runs only during a trip you start, and the same data fills in the SOS screen if the day turns. It’s a TestFlight beta on iPhone now, and Plus, which includes the link, is free during the beta.
Tap Going to sea, pick who sees you and set a return time. Tracking stops when you tap I'm ashore. Nothing runs before or after.
Your Live contacts get it by text message: one tap opens the message, then you hit Send. It opens in a browser, so the person ashore installs nothing and signs up for nothing.
Position, speed, course and your phone's battery level, live on a map. You choose the update interval, from every 5 seconds to every 5 minutes.
A float plan is your route, boat and return time, left with someone ashore. You can’t file one with the Coast Guard; it goes to a responsible person who calls for help if you’re overdue (what to put in one). Paper fails in one predictable way: plans change and the paper doesn’t. A live link shows your contact where you actually are, not where you said you’d be. If you’re past your return time, the app asks you, on your own phone, whether you’re OK. It does not alert anyone else yet, so keep the float plan too. Comparing apps that do send overdue alerts? See float plan apps compared. And if the dot stops somewhere it shouldn’t, what to say on the radio is one page away.
Outside a trip the app doesn’t track you at all. During a trip it reports in the background, every 30 seconds by default (roughly 4% battery an hour by our estimate), and below 20% battery it slows to every 5 minutes on its own. The people watching see your battery level, so a dying phone never reads as a drifting boat. Trip history is kept for 12 months, then deleted automatically. And this website sets no tracking cookies unless you allow them.
A tracking link is not a distress system. It tells your people where you are; it doesn’t alert anyone. In a life-threatening emergency, make a MAYDAY on VHF Channel 16 if you have a radio, and call 911. The app’s SOS screen makes that call fast, and offshore you should still carry a PLB or EPIRB.
No. The link opens in any browser, on any device, with no account. That’s the point: the least technical person in your life can watch you.
No. Those apps show other vessels’ AIS signals. VesselSOS shares your own position, from your phone, with the people you choose, with no AIS hardware on your boat.
Yes. Set your boat type in the profile: sailing boat, motor boat, SUP/kayak or jet ski. Its name, type and color go into the call script, and its name into the texts you send.
The link shows your last known position and that the signal is lost. Positions recorded without signal are queued and sent when coverage returns. Your phone keeps its GPS fix fully offline, so the SOS screen still has your position and MAYDAY text.