onWater Fishing App Review: Smart Tech to Plan Your Trips, Track Your Results and Catch More Fish

I started with a general basemap study. You have the option to look at your water from three different map styles—“dark”, which is fairly simplified but includes shading for surrounding area topography; “satellite”, which as you might expect incorporates satellite photography; and “outdoors”, which looks like the standard graphic-style of Google maps.

Within those basemaps, you can toggle on and off a wide variety of additional data layers like highlighting lakes and rivers, designating public land, private land, weather, boat launches, bridges, rapids, camping, tackle stores, restrooms, cell phone coverage by service provider, and lots more.

For my search, I toggled on the boat launch locations. To be honest, I knew of two of these ramps, but I don’t think I ever realized there was a third launch. And just like that, this app has taught me something about a lake I've been fishing for decades.

Also, I noticed that they do include topographical maps for lots of lakes, showing depth contour lines. While a lot of anglers with boats might have electronics that can show more detailed lake contours, a lot of anglers don’t, making this really helpful information. Or if you’re fishing without a boat, you can get an idea whether areas accessible from shore might have likely fish-holding structure within reach. Plus, it’s always handy information for planning a trip to a new lake, even if you’ll use more detailed info once you get there.

I should note that at this time, the topographical lake info is only available for select lakes in Minnesota, Michigan and Florida. onWater promises to be working on gathering that data for additional areas.

Lake Info & Overview

Like I said, I’ve been fishing this area for years, so I already felt like I knew this lake pretty well. But, I’m always open to discover some new info, and/or I thought I’d do a double check on what the app said.

As the lake overview described, this is a fishery with really strong populations of several species. In particular, it said walleye, while not as abundant as other species, tend to grow large here. It said this lake ranks in the 75-90 percentile for black crappie when compared to similar nearby lakes, with 69% of the population over 10 inches. And it was described as having an excellent population of smallmouth bass.

Spoiler Alert: I’m happy to report that the overview of this lake was exactly as I expected and our trip confirmed everything to be true. We caught several beautiful smallmouth bass that day with one reaching the elusive 20-inch mark. While those bass on their own made it a fun and memorable day, we also managed to connect with a 25-inch walleye and a 14.5-inch crappie. That’s three different species in one day that were all pushing trophy status or at least personal bests for a lot of anglers.

Real-Time Forecasts and Weather Radar for Anglers

Once we had decided on the lake, we were able to do a quick check of the current weather and forecasted conditions. I love the live precipitation radar overlay. We did have some rain predicted for that afternoon, but we were able to see that it didn’t look like thunderstorms or anything dangerous, so we moved forward with our plans.

Smart Fishing Journal: Learn from Every Catch (and Miss)

So far, everything in this app was well-designed and easy-to-use. I guess mostly it wasn't technically info I couldn't find elsewhere, but having it all available in one location was great. But once you add on these next features, the onWater Fish app really begins to stand out.

I have long been an advocate of keeping a fishing journal as one of the best and quickest ways to advance your understanding of fishing and consistently improve your success rate. The onWater Fishing app’s fishing journal makes it really easy to document your catches. You upload a photo and type in just a few particulars of the catch and the app automatically saves an exact waypoint and the most important information about the conditions at the moment you caught that fish. Once you’ve started to fill your journal with catches, you can go back and organize them by trip, body of water, weather conditions, or time of year.

June 2025: New onWater Fishing App Updates

And while everything I experienced with this app was very encouraging, I’ve been told that the company is making a few major upgrades which are available as of this article's publication date.

New Feature #1: An Even Smarter Fishing Journal

Speaking of the fishing journal feature I really enjoyed already, onWater’s new enhanced Journal feature will give anglers a deeper look into their fishing habits and outcomes. With the updated Journal, anglers can now log catches and trips with no catches (yes, it happens to the best of us) for a complete fishing history, and to better understand how, when, and why success happened.

And to paint an even clearer picture of the success, or lack of success, of a particular trip, the app stores river flow, weather, time of day, body of water, moon phase and more automatically.

Once you've started to create a library of your trips, advanced insights will be displayed on a personalized dashboard to help you better understand what works and when.

“Imagine opening your dashboard and instantly seeing the best river flows, the perfect fly pattern for the day, and the ideal time to cast,” said Alex Maier, CMO and Head of Product at onWater. “You’ll have access to everything you need, dialed by data, so all that’s left is the thrill of the catch.”

New Feature #2: AI Fish Measuring That Protects the Catch

One of the items you had to enter into your journal manually was the fish length. But now, onWater’s patented AI Trout Measuring Tool, launching in beta, gives anglers an accurate, hands-off way to log their catches.

Although it seems like magic, onWater’s AI model doesn’t need a ruler, ball, or hand in frame to calculate measurements. The tool identifies a catch from among 107 species of fish and captures length with increasingly high precision. With this tool, which was developed to supplement the needs of state and federal fisheries management agencies, fish spend less time out of water, reducing stress and improving survival rates.

New Feature #3: Angling with Insight, Not Guesswork

With a new “MyWaters” tool, anglers can monitor their favorite spots. The app delivers personalized alerts when conditions in those waters align with those of past successes, helping you know the right where, when, and how to fish, without compromising your spots through public sharing.

Leveraging scientific data such as fish metabolic rates and water temperatures across every body of water in the United States, MyWaters works alongside the enhanced Journal to increase your chances of success. The more you fish, the more insights you gain.

Why onWater Might Be the Best Fishing App Yet

With detailed data on more than 430,000 bodies of water in the U.S., showing species profiles and behavior by season, fishing regulations and reports, access points, planning tools, lake and river data, and amenities like bait shops, campgrounds, ramps, restrooms and so much more, along with a thorough and convenient way to store your personal catch data, you can’t help but get more out of each day of fishing.

How to Download and Start Using onWater Today

You can download onWater in the app store on your phone or head to OnWaterApp.com to learn more.

Transparency Note: The gear reviewed in this article has been provided to me at no cost for evaluation. The views and assessments presented are entirely my own.