Adopt vs Earthtunes
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
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
Read full descriptionHide full description
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.
Earthtunes
Explore the Earth's hidden sounds by amplifying low-frequency seismic waves. This app transforms inaudible geological vibrations into audible pitches, offering a unique auditory experience of our planet's inner workings. Discover the fascinating acoustic phenomena generated by environmental sources and seismic events.
- Listen to inaudible seismic waves
- Amplify low-frequency sounds
- Experience Earth's geological vibrations
- Understand seismic wave origins
- Fascinating auditory exploration
Read full descriptionHide full description
Earthtunes is a mobile App that helps you listen to normally inaudible sounds within the Earth beneath us. These sounds are caused by seismic waves and are so low in frequency that our ears do not hear them. Most of these seismic waves are weak and continuously generated by a range of environmental sources. Some of these seismic waves are strong and caused by earthquakes. If you’ve ever played videos at twice the speed, you will have noticed that the pitch of the video’s sound went up as well. Earthtunes lets you listen to the Earth’s seismic waves by increasing their pitch. Two hours of seismic data translates to several seconds of sound. We hope you find these sounds as fascinating as we do. As seismologists we are working to understand what these sounds mean, it’s like learning a foreign language without a dictionary. While we have learned a lot over the past 100 years, many mysteries remain.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is update cadence: Earthtunes at every 3 months against Adopt's every 40 months. Earthtunes also leads on ratings volume (7 vs 1) and iOS requirement (15.0 vs 17.5). On price, rating, 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.
On the App Store both sit at effectively the same score — 5.0 for Adopt against 5.0 for Earthtunes. That said, the two scores are not equally well evidenced: Earthtunes has 7 ratings behind it against 1, so its average is the more settled of the two.
Adopt ships an update every 40 months, Earthtunes every 3 months. The most recent releases landed on June 1, 2026 and September 24, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | Adopt | Earthtunes |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 5.0 (1 ratings) | 5.0 (7 ratings) |
| Positive reviews | 100.0% of reviews | — |
| Number of ratings | 1 | 7 — better |
| Update frequency | Every 40 months | Every 3 months — better |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | No | No |
| Monetization | Free | Free |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad | iPhone, iPad, iPod — better |
| Requires iOS | 17.5 | 15.0 — better |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 1 MB | 20 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | Frederik Simons | Northwestern University |
Customer experience
Adopt
Earthtunes
In-app purchases
Adopt
No in-app purchases
Earthtunes
No in-app purchases








