SharkSmart
How much does SharkSmart cost?
Prices are current as of 10 Sept 2026.
SharkSmart has no in-app products on record in the United States.
10+ alternatives to SharkSmart
| SharkSmart |   Flexischools |   SharkSmart WA |   OWNA Childcare App |   Sentral for Parents |   FrogID |   Bushfire.io: Natural Disasters |   Beachsafe | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rating / 5 | 4.5 | 4.8 | 4.7 | 3.9 | 2.1 | 3.7 | 4.3 | 3.3 |
| Reviews | 5.6K | 36K | 7.9K | 583 | 559 | 270 | 70 | 66 |
| Released | 2014 | 2018 | 2019 | 2017 | 2017 | 2017 | 2020 | 2010 |
SharkSmart reviews
4.5 out of 5, based on 5,592 reviews.
What people like
- Helps people feel safer in water
- Shows where sharks are moving now
- Devs fix issues if you ask
What they complain about
- Keeps crashing when you open it
- Can’t save your favorite beaches properly
- Sends alerts for beaches far away
- App loads data very slowly
The best gov app ever!
It's very helpful!
Frustratingly useless
Alerts continually come through as NSW north coast, when I have repeatedly input & saved my area which is NSW far south coast. It’s frustrating. I am ready to delete as it’s useless for my area.
Good app but …
I think the app is a great idea however, I have saved my beaches in the first set up process they aren’t listed on the bottom my beach tab and I am being notified about all beaches in NSW. I just want to be notified about the ones I frequent. Can I fix this?
Two suggestions
1. Monitoring stations alert when a tagged shark enters within 500m range, but doesn’t show when they leave the area… what’s the point of that… is it to maintain ongoing fear of swimming? The detection station at Sussex Inlet shows the same sharks repeatedly entering the area but never shows them leaving. This is keeping people out of the water in fear. 2. When i open the App while listening to a podcast on either iPhone or iPad, unlike other noiseless apps Shark Smart causes the podcast to pause. Why does the Shark Smart App capture my sound system when the App is silent? Two more stars if you can address these issues.
App half works
Good design simple enough but seems to crash and not load data, too slow
I only swim in pools
I am going to buy shares in swimming pool companies
Deleted
Have deleted as it is just too many notifications despite turning off notifications. Tells me about beach’s not in my area
Recent updates have improved usability
Very helpful- would love a feature to be able to set a name for local sharks. I’m starting to recognise their tag numbers but naming them would be fun and would help to alleviate some of the anxiety if you knew it was just Becky swimming by for the 5th time this hour lol
Please make it work
Almost perfect but sadly it’s the last 1% is what counts. Despite multiple times setting it to my local beach I get notifications from beaches 100s km away and not my beach. All most us want is an alert to our watch in real time to get out of the water? The core value proposition of a safety app—providing immediate, hyper-local alerts directly to a wrist device for the exact beach a user is standing on—is completely failing. Currently, the app fails to deliver on its primary utility due to critical functional bottlenecks: Broken Geofencing & Notification Logic: Custom radius filters ("Around Me") fail to isolate immediate locations, frequently pushing irrelevant regional noise or missing local pings entirely. Apple Watch Integration Failure: Background syncing and push notifications to watchOS are sluggish, unreliable, or fail to trigger in real time when stepping onto a specific beach. Cluttered UX: Users are forced to sift through historical logs, data padding, and distant alerts rather than receiving an instantaneous, silent wrist vibration for their immediate coordinates. To the Designers: Fix the geofencing logic so it strictly respects tight radius parameters, strip out the background latency on watchOS, and ensure a true, instant push-to-wrist protocol for active local alerts. Right now, as a real-time safety tool on the water's edge, it is non-functional.
Too slow loading
The app is generally great but when you get an alert notification it takes up to 1 minute for the content to load. Barely anyone will wait that long. This need to be fixed.
Best App For Phobias Of Sharks
I am loving this app as I am afraid of sharks
I’d like this available in qld
Great app - but no use for us in qld
Fantastic app & two suggestions
This is a great service from NSW DPI. For someone who spends a lot of time in the ocean, this app provides valuable data. Two suggestions for improvements; deep links from notifications to the beach/buoy with the alert, and time-series reporting that shows shark movement over time.
Excessive notifications
To many notifications up to 300km away
Potential
The overall tagging system is to be commended but the app has bugs in filtering, maps and notifications.
Flakey- no pun intended.
Opened and found zero shark events ever. Now there are drone and listening stations icon but no detail when you click through. Also some dead ends with no clear exit in the site navigation.
No data other than beaches
Needs to be able to report up stream in rivers and harbours as well
Review
This is a great app that sends alerts when and where a shark is tagged or spotted on the coast of New South Wales (Australia)
Annoying
I keep getting push notifications for beaches hundreds of kilometres away, despite having set up notifications for only 9 local beaches.
Add a beach isn’t working
Add a beach isn’t working on my iOS iPhone 15.
Looking for sharks
I don’t really know how to use the app yet
Not targeted to location
I have to turn it off as it beeps non stop, not targeted to my actual location which is being tracked by the app
Florida
Great app overall but it would be highly appreciated if you added Daytona beach and new Smyrna beach considering that Florida is the shark capital of the world.
Irritating
Far too many icons telling us things we don’t want or need to know. Filtering isn’t by event type but for some reason it’s by notification source instead?? Endless alerts from far flung beaches because filtering doesn’t work. In its current state it’s a liability as it doesn’t do its core job of simply telling us which beaches are currently open and safe.
It’s okay, but clunky and glitchy to use.
A good start, but it needs a lot of work. When typing in ‘your beach’ you can only select the beaches that have receivers. This is fine, but initially, I was confused as to why my local beach wouldn’t show up. A message informing you that the beach you searched for doesn’t have a receiver would be good and then suggested beaches that are close to the one you searched for would be helpful. I was getting notifications of tagged sharks at a beach, but then when I went to the ‘map view’ the information wasn’t current. There is a difference between the ‘list’ and the map’s information. The list has the most updated information, but you have to scroll to find it. I was also getting notifications for beaches very far away from my location. So that wasn’t relevant. Would be good to have the shark’s size when it was caught and tagged. I know they grow, but if you saw it was a 2 metre one that was tagged a year ago, compared to a 4 metre one tagged a year ago you’d know there would be a significant difference. This part is not a criticism of the app, it the program in general… There aren’t enough receivers for this to be an effective way to reduce shark encounters. They only have 2 in my local council area on the Illawarra, which is massive. So I can’t get information relevant to me.
Burley
I like to have a quick look on the way home. Just to see where the action is. Info is good, but it won’t change where I swim.
A Million Alerts
Despite saving settings within ‘Manage My Beaches’ multiple times, I get alerts CONSTANTLY about EVERY beach. This is a repeated complaint it seems, looking at the other reviews - spanning months, so I don’t know why developers have not fixed it. Am now turning off ALL notifications which means the app is useless. Very poor form, considering the Govt is spruiking this app to the country.
:(
Was good but now crashes every time I use it
Please fix the issues
Won’t load. Have the most up to date version of the app.
Shark stalking
It’s hard not to get obsessed with stalking the movement of sharks between the ping stations, referencing when and where individual sharks were caught, tagged, released and where they are located in current time. I haven’t been able to ‘add my beaches’…a possible glitch in the software but I often wonder “what the sharks are doing now?” This app gives me some insights.
Works well!
I had issues with my beaches being saved but after submitting feedback the dev team have fixed it - thanks very much! It’s a made the app a lot easier to be able to see the shark activity in my area over the last few days. I slightly miss being able to see the size of the tagged shark (could be worth adding the ‘size when captured’)
Dissapointing
Can’t get my beaches
My Beaches not working
Search does not list any beaches to select.
Favorites
I can’t add my favorite beaches to follow, therefore all notices coming through
MY IDEA AND GIFT TO THE PEOPLE AND NSW GOV
I thought of this! I am a regular local scuba diver and surfer when I was younger. I hope everyone in NSW stays safe now with this app 😊
Waste of money
If NSW just managed sharks like QLD we wouldn’t have so many shark attacks. How many people will die until NSW govt. accepts their new environmental shark policy has failed.. my guess is about 10. Meanwhile, no shark has attacked a surfer or swimmer in a populated QLD beach since the 1960s..
Waste of tax
I’m a Lifeguard on Far South Coast NSW. I re-downloaded this app years after it was released hoping it would be better and nothing has changed. There are no instructions or obvious settings to filter notifications for relevancy. Despite setting local beach and radius to 10km I get notified about sharks 1000km away several times and all hours of the day. Super un-useful and annoying. Also slow to load. Can’t wait until it’s fixed, could be a great tool.
Time for some updates
Decent idea and mostly works, but keeps forgetting my Favourite Beaches. And then you get so many alerts, you’ve either got to stop push notifications or remove the app. I’ve put off leaving a negative review but it doesn’t seem to be getting fixed Also it would be great if you could find out more information about a shark, such as what size it was when it was first tagged.
Very cool app
It’s heaps fascinating tracking sharks (with info about size and type as well as location now and where they’ve been!) even if u never get in the water. But obviously it’s a must-have app for swimmers & surfers to know when tagged monsters are at their local beach!
Map is hanging searching for some location
Map is hanging when opening away from beaches
Favourite beaches
No mater how much I try. Cant enter favourite beaches
What a wonderful app. Well done.
Very interesting, thankyou.
Stuck loading
It is not loading any information at all, waste of time
not working
just got the app let me on once when i signed in everytime i went to click on it now it just boots me out the app before it’s even loaded in
SharkSmart FAQ
- Is SharkSmart free?
- Yes. The app is free, in all 174 countries it sells in, and it sells nothing inside it.
- Does SharkSmart have a free trial?
- No. None of its offers (US) come with a free trial.
- What are the best alternatives to SharkSmart?
- Flexischools (4.8 from 36,036 reviews), SharkSmart WA (4.7 from 7,871 reviews) and OWNA Childcare App (3.9 from 583 reviews).
SharkSmart download
Last updated 1 month ago.
SharkSmart sells in 174 countries. It was released 12 years ago, on 14 Sept 2014. It holds a 4.5 rating from 5,592 reviews.
Supports 5 languages: English, Arabic, Hindi, Chinese, Vietnamese.
How much does SharkSmart make?
Third-party estimates for the last 30 days, worldwide — not the store's own figures, which Apple publishes for nobody.