SharkSmart Reviews: Is It Legit?

SharkSmart
SharkSmart
NSW Department of Primary Industries

Customer Experience

Positive experience27.0% of reviews
Neutral16.0% of reviews
Negative experience57.0% of reviews

~ Based on 100 written reviews from the US App Store.

What users say about SharkSmart

Is SharkSmart Safe?

SharkSmart appears safe based on user ratings. AppsHunter Safety Score for SharkSmart is 85/100.

This assessment is based on 282 user ratings, with an App Store average of 4.3/5.

Safety Analysis

80.1% of ratings point to a safe experience
6.7% of ratings suggest some concerns
13.1% of ratings point to a risky experience

~ Based on 282 App Store ratings for SharkSmart.

Is SharkSmart Legit?

SharkSmart appears to be a legitimate app. AppsHunter Legitimacy Score for SharkSmart is 95/100.

Based on 95 of 100 points across 7 verification signals from App Store and developer data.

Top reviews

Two suggestions

1. Monitoring stations alert when a tagged shark enters within 500m range, but doesn’t show when they leave the area… what’s the point of that… is it to maintain ongoing fear of swimming? The detection station at Sussex Inlet shows the same sharks repeatedly entering the area but never shows them leaving. This is keeping people out of the water in fear.
2. When i open the App while listening to a podcast on either iPhone or iPad, unlike other noiseless apps Shark Smart causes the podcast to pause. Why does the Shark Smart App capture my sound system when the App is silent?

Two more stars if you can address these issues.
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The best gov app ever!

It's very helpful!

Hate

I hate this app

Please make it work

Almost perfect but sadly it’s the last 1% is what counts. Despite multiple times setting it to my local beach I get notifications from beaches 100s km away and not my beach. All most us want is an alert to our watch in real time to get out of the water?

The core value proposition of a safety app—providing immediate, hyper-local alerts directly to a wrist device for the exact beach a user is standing on—is completely failing.

Currently, the app fails to deliver on its primary utility due to critical functional bottlenecks:

Broken Geofencing & Notification Logic: Custom radius filters ("Around Me") fail to isolate immediate locations, frequently pushing irrelevant regional noise or missing local pings entirely.

Apple Watch Integration Failure: Background syncing and push notifications to watchOS are sluggish, unreliable, or fail to trigger in real time when stepping onto a specific beach.

Cluttered UX: Users are forced to sift through historical logs, data padding, and distant alerts rather than receiving an instantaneous, silent wrist vibration for their immediate coordinates.

To the Designers:
Fix the geofencing logic so it strictly respects tight radius parameters, strip out the background latency on watchOS, and ensure a true, instant push-to-wrist protocol for active local alerts. Right now, as a real-time safety tool on the water's edge, it is non-functional.
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Frustratingly useless

Alerts continually come through as NSW north coast, when I have repeatedly input & saved
my area which is NSW far south coast. It’s frustrating. I am ready to delete as it’s useless for my area.

What’s happened?

I used to be able to access sharks along the East Coast of the US . Now all I hear about is Australia and there’s no way I can see to fix this

I only swim in pools

I am going to buy shares in swimming pool companies

Deleted

Have deleted as it is just too many notifications despite turning off notifications. Tells me about beach’s not in my area

Best App For Phobias Of Sharks

I am loving this app as I am afraid of sharks

I’d like this available in qld

Great app - but no use for us in qld

Good app but …

I think the app is a great idea however, I have saved my beaches in the first set up process they aren’t listed on the bottom my beach tab and I am being notified about all beaches in NSW. I just want to be notified about the ones I frequent. Can I fix this?

Recent updates have improved usability

Very helpful- would love a feature to be able to set a name for local sharks. I’m starting to recognise their tag numbers but naming them would be fun and would help to alleviate some of the anxiety if you knew it was just Becky swimming by for the 5th time this hour lol

No data other than beaches

Needs to be able to report up stream in rivers and harbours as well

Excessive notifications

To many notifications up to 300km away

Annoying

I keep getting push notifications for beaches hundreds of kilometres away, despite having set up notifications for only 9 local beaches.

Not targeted to location

I have to turn it off as it beeps non stop, not targeted to my actual location which is being tracked by the app

App half works

Good design simple enough but seems to crash and not load data, too slow

Too slow loading

The app is generally great but when you get an alert notification it takes up to 1 minute for the content to load. Barely anyone will wait that long. This need to be fixed.

A Million Alerts

Despite saving settings within ‘Manage My Beaches’ multiple times, I get alerts CONSTANTLY about EVERY beach. This is a repeated complaint it seems, looking at the other reviews - spanning months, so I don’t know why developers have not fixed it. Am now turning off ALL notifications which means the app is useless. Very poor form, considering the Govt is spruiking this app to the country.
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Flakey- no pun intended.

Opened and found zero shark events ever. Now there are drone and listening stations icon but no detail when you click through. Also some dead ends with no clear exit in the site navigation.