Tide Tables Brazil

Tide Tables Brazil: nice 11 years it was!

Dear user,

The purpose of this app has always been to show all the tides, waves and wind data from various official websites on your phone screen in an integrated and smart way. These websites were the Brazilian Navy and CPTEC/INPE. For 11 years since 2010, I've done just that with high standards, as this app was even quoted in well known printed magazines.

About 3 years ago, the Navy removed the old tides website and replaced it with one that have tides in PDF format, requiring reverse engineering of the text, which is very error prone, a problem that didn't occur in the old website. As there is no official standard, the correction of the data must be verified manually. And since there are at least 76,000 tide entries each year, manually checking if the app data matches the official data is humanly impossible and error prone, and this verification is becoming increasingly more difficult and complex.

In short, the Navy's new system has made it impossible to provide tidal data that can be automatically verified for correctness by third parties. This is unacceptable because it puts YOUR SECURITY at risk.

In addition, the waves and winds service of CPTEC/INPE has suffered constant service outages in recent years, and the most recent one, in July 2021, led to a blackout of waves and winds data for almost a month. Meanwhile, you demanded a correction that I could never provide. While I've never had a problem reading your criticism for 11 years, this time the blackout could have serious consequences for anyone at sea and relying on this data for their own safety. Some users use it even for fishing in open seas, which needs a sense of duty from me.

To summarize, I apologize but the app has become too dangerous to use, and I can't accept that. Please note that rating the application with 1 star will achieve nothing: it is a problem of availability of structured data that involves bureaucracy and poor quality of digital public services that is beyond my reach. It's about the Public Administration always working against digital innovation in Brazil, as I have personally seen during these 11 years.

Finally, please be aware that I have never done this for money, as it was always too little, and it was even zero in the last few years.

I hope I can count on your understanding for this decision to terminate the app.

The author