Connected Earth vs Adopt
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Connected Earth
Explore global transportation and communication networks. Visualize roads, railways, shipping lanes, and flight routes, along with submarine internet cables, to understand Earth's interconnectedness. Gain a unified perspective of our planet and the systems that link us.
- Global transportation visualization
- Communication network mapping
- Interactive Earth view
- Submarine cable layer
- Unified planet perspective
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Discover how we travel and communicate across the globe. Planet Earth is interconnected in countless ways. Explore this connectedness from a global perspective. Visualize overlaying roads, railways, navigable rivers, shipping lanes, and flight routes to uncover how we move across the planet. Dive into the intricate relationships between transport and communication networks. Activate the internet connection layer to reveal submarine cables and see how the world's populated areas interact. Gain insight into the incredible systems that link us together and raise awareness of the amazing planet we call home. Learn to see the world as one unified planet, where we are all interconnected and together.
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 review sentiment: Adopt at 100% against Connected Earth's 33%. Adopt also leads on rating (5.0 vs 4.0) and update cadence (every 40 months vs every 91 months). Connected Earth's advantage is ratings volume (3 vs 1) and iOS requirement (12.0 vs 17.5). On price, ads, in-app purchases and monetization model 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 4.0. Both are backed by a comparable volume of ratings — 3 and 1 respectively. Written reviews point the same way: 33% of Connected Earth's written reviews are positive against 100% of Adopt's.
Connected Earth ships an update every 91 months, Adopt every 40 months. The most recent releases landed on October 15, 2026 and October 12, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | Connected Earth | Adopt |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 4.0 (3 ratings) | 5.0 (1 ratings) — better |
| Positive reviews | 33.3% of reviews | 100.0% of reviews — better |
| Number of ratings | 3 — better | 1 |
| Update frequency | Every 91 months | Every 40 months — better |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | No | No |
| Monetization | Free | Free |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad, iPod — better | iPhone, iPad |
| Requires iOS | 12.0 — better | 17.5 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 63 MB | 1 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | Celestial Dynamics AG | Frederik Simons |
Customer experience
Connected Earth
Adopt
In-app purchases
Connected Earth
No in-app purchases
Adopt
No in-app purchases
Questions
Is Connected Earth free?
Is Adopt free?
Which has better reviews, Connected Earth or Adopt?
Do Connected Earth or Adopt have ads?
Which is updated more often, Connected Earth or Adopt?
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