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An Apple Watch with dive stats.
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A map and key environmental stats on an iPhone screen.
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Graphs with depth and other statistics.
In September, Apple announced a new wearable, the Apple Watch Ultra, and one of the company’s main pitches for the device was its use as a dive computer. Now Oceanic+, the app that enables that feature, has launched exclusively for the Ultra, Apple announced today.
The Watch Ultra has depth gauge and water temperature sensors that power some functions in the app. To access some of those features, such as decompression tracking, you’ll need to subscribe to the premium version of the app for $4.99 per day, $9.99 per month, or $79.99 per year. There is also a family plan for $129.99 per year. If you don’t subscribe, you can still use some important features like dive logs, depth tracking, etc.
The app, which was co-developed with Apple by a company called Huish Outdoors, lets you monitor diving conditions like tides, water temperature, and more. Here’s a quick summary of Apple’s blog post announcement:
In the dive planner, users can set their surface time, their depth and their gas, and Oceanic+ calculates their No Deco (no-decompression) time – a measure used to set a time limit for a diver at a certain depth. The planner also integrates dive conditions including tides, water temperature and even up-to-date information from the community such as visibility and currents. After the dive, users will see data, including GPS entry and exit locations, automatically appear on Apple Watch Ultra, along with a summary of their dive profile. The summary on the Oceanic+ iPhone app provides additional information, including a map of entry and exit locations, as well as graphs of depth, temperature rate of rise, and no-decompression limit.
Many of the features focus on pre-planning dives or viewing dive reports after you’re done, but for those you use underwater, the app uses haptics to send you alerts. The very bright screen of the Watch Ultra can also help with underwater readability.
The app does not work with other Apple Watch models. To use it, you need an Apple Watch with watchOS 9.1, and that Watch must be paired with an iPhone 8 or later with iOS 16.1.
Frame image by Samuel Axon
