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

From live weather info and thorough access data to an AI fish measurement tool and easy, detailed journaling, here’s why onWater is one of the most advanced fishing apps I’ve used.

The onWater app allows you to track catches, map lakes, check forecasts, measure fish with AI, and more. | Photo by Mike Staggs

What is the onWater Fishing App?

I was recently given the opportunity to check out a fishing app called onWater. Of course, I’ve checked out a lot of fishing apps over the years (and at one point even considered designing one myself) and had never seen one quite so comprehensive and packed with information as this app. It’s a great one-stop shop for real-time conditions and forecasts, lake and river stats and survey data, fishing regulations, access information, future trip planning tools and documenting past fishing successes…and failures.

Testing the App in Real-World Conditions

For my test, I decided to run the app in a location I knew quite well and had been fishing at least once per year, most of my adult life. This was my annual trip to Northern Wisconsin, an area with a wide diversity of fish species, but where I would primarily be targeting largemouth and smallmouth bass.

Quick Side Note: To be perfectly clear, it looks like the company founders at onWater are hardcore fly fishermen from the Northwestern U.S. While the onWater app offers a ton of great, usable data for all species, techniques and locations nationwide, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the info is even more refined and robust for those fly anglers pursuing trout in that part of the country.

So, I picked a lake for that afternoon and did a little research with the onWater Fishing app.

Interactive Fishing Maps with Topo and Access Info

Available in three different map styles, you can choose whichever is easiest to read with your particular body of water's surrounding details and information. | onWaterApp.com

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.

This is an example of a topo map of a little lake in Minnesota I used to fish when I lived in the area. onWater currently has this data included for select lakes in Minnesota, Michigan and Florida, with more states coming ASAP. | onWaterApp.com

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

The overview information proved to be spot on for my day on the water. | onWaterApp.com

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.

The onWater app overview of this lake was spot on! We caught beautiful smallmouth bass, walleye and crappie exactly as the app described. | Photo by Mike Staggs

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.

I forgot to take a screen capture of the lake we fished that day, but as I was writing this review, I noticed Lake Okeechobee had a pretty serious storm moving through. Yes, you can get animated precipitation radar from almost any weather app, but if you look at it here in onWater, you can quickly see where the nearest ramp might be if you need to run for cover. | onWaterApp.com

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

The journaling feature is easy to use and captures a good amount of relevant data automatically. | onWaterApp.com

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.

That sure was a big, beautiful crappie that showed up for our day on the lake! And according to the info in the onWater app, we were on the right lake to run into this caliber of fish. | Photo by Kurt Mazurek

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.