B G Reviews

My boat is equipped with B&G instruments. I was looking to spend several thousand dollars updating the chartplotter based on the promise of BG, and its capability to plan routes and then sync with their latest instruments. However, so far BG seems to be far from ready for prime time, and may even be risky to rely on for navigation. It is very unintuitive, buggy, and crashes regularly with a white screen appearing in some instances. Even basic functions such as route planning do not appear to work. I already use iNavX and TZiBoat. Both of these apps are streets ahead of B&G’s being much easier to use, and bug free and with many more features built in.

Furthermore, since 23rd June 2023, the B&G app refuses to launch and a splash screen says B&G is experiencing a “service outage”. Subscriptions have been extended based on this. Brunswick Corp that owns B&G has been the subject of a significant “IT Security Incident” that affected a number of their businesses and made headline news. Maybe they are related? Either way, I would advise not wasting your money yet on BG which is not even at Beta test level.

I really wanted this to work. Problems:
- doesn’t synch from Zeus S to iPhone. After waiting 2 hrs to reach tech support, I was told that it will synch if both phone and Zeus are logged into a separate Wi-Fi system. Ug.
- measure distance feature would be great but it is wildly inaccurate. It says the distance from San Francisco to Seattle is 3800 feet.
-incredibly, the Create Route feature doesn’t let you creat a route from your waypoints. Instead you just pick start and destination points and it creates a computer generated route. Useless.
- the weather forecast feature is sooo slow and doesn’t indicate which weather model or source data is used. Since you evidently have to be on a Wi-Fi network to use it, you’ have much better options on the internet.

This is hands down the most disappointing thing I have ever seen from B&G. It feels like BG was developed by someone who has never actually navigated a boat. The route planning function is completely and totally useless. They tried to make BG simple by removing functions and letting BG decide things for the user. Planning a route is something that requires detail and precision. Hire a new app development company B&G. You can do better.

I usually don’t write reviews BUT…
I have installed a full suite of Triton instruments with a Vulcan 9 MFD. There are absolutely NO problems with the instruments The problems is customer support. If you have a question, you better work it out yourself because B and G won’t respond. I have wanted on the phone for up to 50 minutes listening to the recording that says ‘you are third inline’ more times than I care to remember. I have emailed questions and the very next day you get - wait for it- a case number. I bought the B and G because they are sailing instruments as opposed to Garmin that has fishing apps, etc on their MFD. Knowing what I know now, I think I would have bought Garmin instead JUST for the better customer service

The old app was a bit clunky but could be used. The new one asks for my email, then refuses to let me create an account or log in. That makes BG pretty much useless.

UPDATE: I found the problem. The developers set it up where it will *ONLY* work with Safari. Since my default browser is Firefox, BG won’t allow me to log in.

A good developer would have set BG up to use whichever browser is default.

I really tried to like this app since all my instruments are B&G.
However trying to update offline maps on a new iPad is impossible. Even on a 1GB internet connection at home it takes days to download the US East Coast maps. Imagine trying this while on the way with marginal internet. I flagged this once before with no reaction and even after multiple updates of BG it has not gotten better.
Navionics is doing a much better job, so does Orca.
B&G,
Downloads are not rocket science PLEASE FIX THIS ISSUE

BG as well intentioned and I use it because I have B & G devices but I’d really prefer some thing better. Lots of little bugs and issues in basic usage of BG . Simple things like when you create a route from a point you’ve selected on the map it says that as your starting location instead of destination. It’s easy to change but it’s just not well thought out. That seems to sum up most of the issues with BG well intention but not very good.

Have B&G instruments on my sailboat and just purchased the new Zeus S. The Zeus S is mounted at the nav station and I thought I could use BG in the cockpit.
I want to like BG, it looks great and works well - when it works. But it loses positioning and the only way to know is see 0 for speed, somewhat dicey in a tight spot. It continually attempts to use wifi or cellular if enabled and most of my sailing is in remote locations with very slow internet access. BG hangs unresponsive as it seeks internet data. I can somewhat mitigate this by putting my phone in airplane mode but it leaves me without text messaging.

A setting for the user to set BG to only work offline would be a helpful addition. Overall not a reliable app for real time navigation. The Zeus S however is rock solid.

I love BG until the recent upgrades made it unusable. I keep getting the maps loading screen. I have bought BG based on my previous experience with the trial unfortunately I am no longer able to use BG .
I have upgraded BG , uninstalled and reinstalled and still have no maps.

I really try to like BG, but it’s just a hassle. When it works, it needs an internet connection to transfer from Navionics to B&G. There is NO way possible to import a GPX file other than importing over Wi-Fi. Isn’t BG suppose to make our lives easier?!
The connection to my Zeus 3s drops off continuously while my phone is sitting right next to it. It has a 50% chance of transferring a route to my plotter.
For a company that promotes “High End”, “Racing” type performance, I would expect a lot more consistency from BG. Not to mention “Ease of Use”.

The latest version of BG Back button doesn’t work. Go into any sub screen, the back button on the top left wont respond to and tap or click. The offline map downloads take forever with a 50Mbps DL connection. Get better server or put downloads on the cloud.

BG didn’t work for over a week and for the first several days there was no information from B&G. They finally updated the error message, but it’s very frustrating that even the free features became unavailable while their system was down.

BG is pretty powerful. Occasionally have an issue getting BG to sync routes with my chart plotter. The biggest issue I have is with the lack of a mast height specification. It is not unusual for the auto-routing to take me under a low bridge. Bridges are very hard to see on the chart because they are a very thin line and usually light gray.

It is dead annoying to discover a low bridge in the route that I did not catch, and have to turn around.

I’ve been a B&G user since the old analog days when it was not so well known in the US. They have come a long way to be mainstream in the boating industry with the highest quality IMHO instruments out there. Naturally I use the phone app and find it better than Navionics most of the time.
Synching with Bluetooth between the phone and MFD is a cool feature. Planning routes is easy and very intuitive.
Keep up the great work B&G.

I like the B and G navigation app. It’s very easy to use and accurate. I have used it to navigate between Long Beach and Ensenada, Mexico. I was bringing my friends sailboat back up and it helped me navigate, plus helped me figure out when and where I would need to put in for more fuel. It ended up being Oceanside at 2 am. So I was very grateful to be able to safely navigate into there in the middle of the night with confidence.

BG has improved over the last few years, enough so that I use it instead of Navionics. I have all B&G equipment and three years ago found BG to be deficient but now it does every need it to do as a coastal sailor. Keep the improvements coming.

I use BG on an iPhone 12 mini, the first time I downloaded it the maps would not load, but I had bought premium. I uninstalled BG and then reinstalled it and the charts loaded. Premium is a nice package and I enjoy BG . Overall great app

Updating my previous review- Technical issues resolved with the latest update. The new app is great. Upgrade to premium and you’ll find yourself using this more than your actual chart plotter.

This is one of my favorite navigation apps, but the latest update has it hanging on the loading screen saying “setting up charts, this could take up to a minute” the maps never load. Using an iPhone 12 Pro for reference.

I just purchased a new boat that came with B&G chart plotter. I was told the BG would allow me to register all the equipment, which it did. I now find that it has much more. I was able to create routes by just selecting a start point and end point, and app figures all the waypoints between them. But the best part was the when I select the chart plotter from BG I can sync BG to the chart plotter and all the routes are transferred and stored in the chart plotter no need to copy anything.

very intuitive to get distance between locations, and find routes. This has helped me lay out a general plan for the next month of our sailing.