# Drift: Message in a Bottle — Send words across real water > Send words across real water (iPhone/iPad app by Jason McBride.) - Source: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/drift-message-in-a-bottle/id6802884332 (this page in markdown: same URL + `.md`) - Developer: [Jason McBride](https://appshunter.io/developer/1798305153) - Category: Games, Simulation - Price: Free with in-app purchases - Age rating: 4+ - Requires: iOS 15.0 · 31 MB - Languages: American English - Released: 2026-08-25 - Data updated: 2026-09-05 - User reviews in markdown: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/drift-message-in-a-bottle/id6802884332/reviews.md ## What is Drift? Write a message. Seal it in a bottle. Throw it in the water. Then wait. Your bottle doesn't go into a database — it goes into the actual world. It drifts on real currents, gets pushed off course by real storms, and takes real months to get anywhere. A bottle released off Nova Scotia might reach Ireland by spring. It might also spend a winter going nowhere in the North Atlantic, because that is what the weather did. One day it washes ashore, and a stranger picks it up. YOU DO NOT NEED AN OCEAN Rivers and lakes count. Drift knows three hundred navigable lakes and the rivers between them, so a bottle can leave a pier on Lake Superior, work its way down the St Marys River, and be picked up by someone in another country entirely. If there is water near you, you can send a bottle. If there isn't, Drift will tell you honestly rather than pretending. A DIFFERENT KIND OF SOCIAL Drift has no feed, no followers, no profiles, and no chat. You cannot message the person who found your bottle. You cannot look them up. You follow bottles, not people. What you get instead is a passport: every storm, every current, every country, every pair of hands, written down in the order it happened. A bottle can cross an ocean and pass through a dozen sets of hands before it stops. You can read all of it. SHOW SOMEONE WHERE IT WENT Every bottle has a page you can send to anyone: the chart of its route, the storms it met, the coasts it passed, the borders it crossed. Whoever you send it to doesn't need Drift to open it. What your message says isn't on that page. That stays between you and whoever finds the bottle. WALK DOWN TO THE SHORE Once in a while, something washes up. Most days nothing does — that is the design, not a bug. When one is there, you pull the cork, read what a stranger wrote, and decide what happens next: add a line and send it on, or carry it with you and release it somewhere new. A bottle you carry to another coast picks up your journey too. Finding is always free. It always will be. REAL WEATHER, REAL WATER Bottles move on live forecasts and real current data — ocean gyres at sea, wind and flow on a lake. The shore you stand on shows the weather and the time of day where you actually are: sun low over the water at dusk, moonlight broken across it at night, heavier surf when it's rough out. When a passport says a storm pushed your bottle 93 km off course, that storm happened. BUILT TO BE KIND No exact location is ever stored or shown. Positions are deliberately blurred to about a kilometre before they leave your phone, and blurred again before anyone else sees them. Your name is invented — nobody sees who you are. Messages are screened, reportable, and reviewed by a person. You can block and mute. WHAT IT COSTS Sending a bottle costs one bottle. You start with one, and packs are available if you want to send more. Finding, reading, adding to, and carrying bottles is free and unlimited. No ads. No tracking. No subscription. Drift is slow on purpose. It is not trying to be checked every hour. Send one, forget about it, and let it surprise you in March. ## Pricing and in-app purchases Base price: Free. **One-time purchases** | Purchase | Price | Type | | --- | --- | --- | | 1 Bottle | $0.99 | one-time | | 5 Bottles | $2.99 | one-time | | 12 Bottles | $5.99 | one-time | | 30 Bottles | $9.99 | one-time | ## Version history (last 3 releases) ### 1.0.2 — 2026-09-01 Fixed: a bottle you found but could not send on. If you had not yet let Drift see roughly where you are, passing a bottle onward failed with a note saying it needed a rough location — without ever asking you for one. Now it asks. It also keeps hold of your last known position rather than forgetting it the moment the signal drops indoors, which is where most people read a bottle. Uncorking, reading and adding your line always worked. It was only letting go again that did not. Also in this version: - The way in is always there. A slow moment on the network could leave the opening screen showing an error instead of a sign-in button. - Your bottles sit where they actually are. Two let go from the same town used to draw on top of each other, sometimes over the town rather than out at sea. - Every stretch of water has a name, so fewer bottles report drifting through nowhere in particular. - A bottle let go in Lake Superior can reach the sea. It travels down the St Marys River, through the lakes, and out along the St Lawrence. - Lakes no longer all drift east at the same speed. On a lake a bottle goes where the wind takes it. ### 1.0.1 — 2026-08-28 Share where your bottle has been. Every bottle now has a page you can send to anyone — its route drawn as a chart, the storms it met, the coasts it passed, the borders it crossed. Whoever you send it to does not need Drift to open it. What your message says is not on that page: that stays between you and whoever finds the bottle. Also in this version: - When the tide takes a beached bottle back out, you hear about it. A bottle that washed ashore used to go quiet for weeks, with no way to tell it had started moving again. - A bottle's first year adrift is marked in its passport. - Settings shows which version of Drift you are running. ### 1.0 — 2026-08-25 No release notes. ## More apps by Jason McBride - [Magpie: Inventory & Stock](https://appshunter.io/ios/app/magpie-inventory-and-stock/id6742420624) - [SteadyShell](https://appshunter.io/ios/app/steadyshell/id6745529920) All apps by Jason McBride: https://appshunter.io/developer/1798305153 ## Related topics [message in a bottle](https://appshunter.io/ios/topics/message-in-a-bottle) · [a message in a bottle](https://appshunter.io/ios/topics/a-message-in-a-bottle) --- *Data collected daily from the US App Store and indexed by [AppsHunter](https://appshunter.io/). User reviews are verbatim App Store reviews. Ratings, prices and chart positions refresh continuously; this snapshot is from 2026-09-05.*