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This was a very simple and useful app for a long time until recently, when I started to receive a lot of annoying and unprofessional advertising on it. I don’t really mind ads in general, as I know they need to make money, but the way they are implementing advertising on this app results in an unacceptable use experience. Two recent examples come to mind: (1) I received a survey invitation in the app to weigh in on building the wall between the US and Mexico. The survey itself was strongly biased toward one particular point of view, and wasn’t really a scientific survey or poll intended to get true public sentiment, so I found it annoying to go through, knowing the results would not be used fairly. And (2) Today, I received an interstitial ad with uninitiated audio, which means that music started to play for an ad as I open the app without any ability to control to stop it for a period of time. This is totally unacceptable advertising on any digital platform, except perhaps if you’re visiting a site or app where you expect uninitiated audio, like a movies review site/app. I am an expert in user experience, advertising online, and design, and I can tell you from years of experience and tons of data that this will make users extremely annoyed. It does not work as an effective form of advertising in the long run. Therefore, I am deleting this app from my phone and seeking alternatives.

This has been a very useful tool when kayaking on my local river which has a strong tidal effect. It’s also nice to be able to check the state of the tides when planning an outing to the ocean. What i really hate about this app is the advertising they push at you about every fourth time you open it. I get that it’s free, and i fully expect to be shilled to on a free bit of software, but the advertising is almost exclusively loud volume hyper conservative “financial planning” advice. During the abysmally embarrassing tRump years this app bombarded you with loud bombastic ads like “do you love tRump more than jesus and are democrats satan” like ridiculously over the top survey type questions. I would just close out the app and reopen it and the ad would be gone but the sudden Q-Anon conspiracy announcements could be embarrassing. Although clearly designed by extremists this app uses publicly owned tidal stations to present very useful information to those of us who love the water.

Great app, except that when you open it it sometimes plays video ads *with sound*, even when your phone is on silent. This is really intrusive, especially since I often check the app in the morning when my partner is still asleep. Practices like this actually make me less likely to subscribe/buy the pro version. I’ll just find another app. To the developer: please consider removing the ads with sound. This is a terrible user experience. At a minimum ads like this need to respect the silent mode switch.