Port Call Counter: How the Widget Counts Your Ports

Crew count ports the way they count days. On a feeder the number climbs every other day. On a tanker waiting at anchor it barely moves. The widget keeps that number as PORTS, the third counter on the card, and it has two ways to keep it right.

By hand: minus and plus

The port number on the widget has a minus on its left and a plus on its right. Tap plus when the lines are ashore. That is the whole method, and it works on iPhone and Android without opening the app. When you set the widget up in the middle of a trip, the app asks how many port calls you already had, so the count starts where you are.

By phone: "Alongside in Singapore?"

Switch on port detection and the phone does the noticing.

1. The app carries a list of ports, built from the World Port Index of the U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.
2. When your phone has been inside the area of a listed port for 15 minutes, it sends a notification: "Alongside in Singapore?"
3. You answer on the lock screen. COUNT THE PORT adds one to PORTS and puts the port on your list. DISMISS THE PORT leaves the count alone.

The question comes while the app is closed, and the answer does not open it. A run ashore does not trigger a second question for the same port a few hours later. If you dismissed a port, left and came back, the phone asks again.

Detection runs from your first day on board to your last and starts by itself on sign-on day. Every port you counted is listed in the app, and you can remove one if it got in by mistake. Ship enthusiasts have no port counter. Crew and cruise guests do.

Why it asks first

A phone cannot tell alongside from close by. An anchorage off the breakwater, a bunker stop, a slow pass through the fairway: the coordinates look the same. You know whether it was a port call. So the app treats its own detection as an estimate and leaves the count to you.

Your position stays on the phone

For port detection the app compares your precise position with its port list, on the phone. The position is not sent to us or to any server. That is also why it needs more permission than the weather does: precise location, access set to "Always", and notifications for the question.

The weather works differently and with less. It sends a position rounded to about 11 km, as described on the main widget page.

When the question does not come

Almost always a phone setting is in the way. A battery saver has stopped the app, location is on "While using", or precise location is off. The Access tab shows port detection in grey when something is missing, and a tap on the grey row leads to the setting. The setup guide has the details by phone.

What a counted port is, and is not

PORTS is your own tally. It is not a record of the ship's calls and proves nothing to a company or an authority. Whether a call turns into time ashore is another story: what shore leave is. And the days between the ports are counted by the contract countdown.

Questions about port counting

YES, WE ARE CREW.