CHASING GO1 vs Boatlink

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A boat is a loud place. The engine is running, the wind takes your voice away, and the person you need is at the other end of the deck with a line in both hands. Boatlink puts the crew on one line. Every phone and tablet aboard talks to every other one, hands-free, so "ready on the bow" is heard at the helm in a normal voice. It needs no internet and no phone signal. On a boat with wifi, the router carries it. With no router, one person turns on Personal Hotspot in iOS Settings and the crew join that. Boatlink cannot switch a hotspot on for you — iOS does not let any app do that — so somebody has to do it by hand. GETTING ABOARD One person hosts. Their screen shows a QR code; everyone else points a camera at it and they are on. If a camera will not do the job — rain, dark, glare, a cracked screen — the host reads out a four-letter code instead, and the crew type that in with the boat's address. TALKING Open mic by default: speak and the crew hears you. Or switch to VOX, which opens the line when you start talking and closes it when you stop. Mute is one large control, sized to be hit with a glove on and found without looking. If someone is not answering, ring them. Their phone chimes, vibrates and flashes its camera light. They answer or they decline. LEVELS The ICS panel gives you a level for each person on the line, plus a master. Every level is yours alone. Turning the foredeck down on your phone changes nothing for anybody else, and the person you turned down is never told. MUSIC Everyone plays music in their own app. Boatlink can show the crew what you have on, as text, so they can put the same thing on. Boatlink plays no audio itself, and it cannot read your music app — you type the track in. PRIVACY Nothing leaves the boat. No account, no sign-up, no server, no analytics, no tracking, no ads. Traffic between phones is encrypted with AES-256-GCM under a key derived from the boat's own code, so a phone in the next berth can neither join the line nor read what is on it. IF THE HOST GOES DOWN If the phone that is hosting runs its battery flat or goes over the side, the rest of the crew re-form around another phone in about three seconds. Nobody types anything in again. WHAT IT NEEDS Two devices, at least. One phone on its own shows an empty "find the boat" screen, because there is no boat to find. All devices on the same network — the boat's wifi, or a Personal Hotspot somebody has turned on. Permission to use the local network, which iOS asks for the first time you host or join. WHAT IT DOES NOT DO YET It does not relay from phone to phone. If there is no router and no hotspot, there is no line. It does not reach anyone who is ashore or otherwise off the boat's network. Ringing does not wake a locked phone the way an incoming call does. It has no alarms of any kind. Man overboard, anchor watch and alarm handling belong to the full Sea Glass Cockpit product, not to this app. There is no chat, and no music service is connected to it. Boatlink is free, and it stays free.