Polar Explorer vs Adopt
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Polar Explorer
Explore historical, current, and future sea levels through interactive maps and images. This educational app uses text and audio guidance to cover over 100 topics, engaging users with questions to deepen their understanding of climate science.
- Interactive sea level maps
- Historical and future projections
- Text and audio guidance
- Over 100 exploration topics
- Question-based learning
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Polar Explorer is an education app. It educates the user about past, present and future sea level. Education is achieved by exploring maps and images created with real data. The user can be guided by text and audio. There are more than 100 topics that can be explored. The user is guided through the app by responding to questions. The app is funded by NSF.
Adopt
Access real-time data from autonomous oceanographic floats that record seismic activity. View instrument locations, trajectories, and health parameters. This app provides a low-cost method for oceanic data collection.
- View MERMAID instrument locations
- Access recent trajectories
- Obtain ocean depth information
- View instrumental metadata
- Identify instruments by name and institution
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Adopt-A-Float allows users to access trajectory metadata and state-of-health parameters of the EarthScope-Oceans MERMAID fleet. MERMAID, short for Mobile Earthquake Recording in Marine Areas by Independent Divers, is a long-lived drifting autonomous float equipped with a hydrophone capable of recording acoustic waveforms generated by distant earthquakes. Most earthquakes occur at or near plate boundaries, yet most seismic monitoring stations are on dry land. Deployed but not recovered, telemetering data in near-real-time, MERMAIDs are uniquely positioned as a low-cost alternative for geophysical and environmental oceanic data collection. Diving down to a typical parking depth of 1500 m below the ocean surface, they passively drift with the ocean currents, recording the ambient acoustic wavefield, identifying earthquake signals, and surfacing to report those, on average every 4-7 days with the current settings, which are expected to give them a five-year life span. When at the surface, MERMAID collects GPS location and time information and communicates with the IRIDIUM satellite constellation using RUDICS. Using this iOS app you can: View the current location of all MERMAID instruments View their most recent trajectories and obtain information about ocean depth View instrumental metadata such as battery level and instrument pressure readings Identify the instruments by name and by operating institution Developed by Tenzing Sherpa ©2021 by Frederik J Simons (www.frederik.net) Let us know what you think! Give us feedback via https://github.com/tenzingsherpaa/AdoptAFloat-3.0/issues We acknowledge support from the U.S. National Science Foundation (www.nsf.org) under grants OCE-1917058 and EAR-1150145 (CAREER), and from Princeton University. MERMAID was designed by scientists and engineers and is now built by OSEAN SAS (www.osean.fr), from which it is commercially available. EarthScope-Oceans (www.earthscopeoceans.org) is an organization founded by a multidisciplinary group of geoscientists who are coordinating efforts to create a global network of sensors that monitor the Earth from within the oceanic environment. As other organizations are doing for the land-based seismological communities today, EarthScope-Oceans shepherds national projects into the international arena where globally relevant, applicable, and mutually agreed-upon decisions can be made on instrument development, science objectives, data management, and outreach.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is update cadence: Polar Explorer at every 2 weeks against Adopt's every 40 months. Polar Explorer also leads on ratings volume (10 vs 1) and iOS requirement (6.0 vs 17.5). Adopt's advantage is rating (5.0 vs 4.6). On price, review sentiment, ads and in-app purchases there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
Both are free to download. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.
Adopt holds the better App Store score, 5.0 against 4.6. That said, the two scores are not equally well evidenced: Polar Explorer has 10 ratings behind it against 1, so its average is the more settled of the two. Written reviews split almost evenly too, at 100% and 100% positive.
Polar Explorer ships an update every 2 weeks, Adopt every 40 months. The most recent releases landed on October 19, 2026 and October 12, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | Polar Explorer | Adopt |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 4.6 (10 ratings) | 5.0 (1 ratings) — better |
| Positive reviews | 100.0% of reviews | 100.0% of reviews |
| Number of ratings | 10 — better | 1 |
| Update frequency | Every 2 weeks — better | Every 40 months |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | No | No |
| Monetization | Free | Free |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad, iPod — better | iPhone, iPad |
| Requires iOS | 6.0 — better | 17.5 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 10 MB | 1 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | Columbia University | Frederik Simons |
Customer experience
Polar Explorer
Adopt
In-app purchases
Polar Explorer
No in-app purchases
Adopt
No in-app purchases









