Support

Adrift is made by one person. If something is wrong, or you are stuck, or you want to tell somebody it worked — write to hello@tryadrift.com. You will get a reply from a human, usually within a few days.

What helps when you write

Roughly when it happened, which screen you were on, and what you expected instead. If the app showed you an error, the words it used. You do not need to send screenshots and you do not need to explain what a bottle is.

We cannot look up a bottle by what it says. Notes are not attached to a name and the app holds no record of who read what, which is deliberate and is also why some questions genuinely cannot be answered from this end.

It says I am not close enough to the water

Adrift only works at the edge of real water — the sea, and lakes and rivers large enough to be worth walking to. You need to be within about a hundred metres of it. A promenade or a beach is close enough; a car park with a view is not.

This is the whole point rather than an obstacle. A bottle you can throw from a sofa is a message, and there are already apps for those.

It says it cannot tell where I am

Your phone reports how confident it is about your position, and Adrift refuses to act on a vague one rather than guess. Indoors, in a station, or among tall buildings, that reading is often far worse than it looks.

Step outside, wait a few seconds, and it usually settles. If it does not, check that Adrift has permission to use your location while you are using the app.

I cannot see where my bottle is

You are not meant to. Once a bottle is let go, Adrift will not tell you where it is, how far it has gone, or which way it went, and there is no setting that changes this. Nothing is broken and nothing is hidden from you that is shown to anybody else.

The Ocean map shows bottles under way, coarsened to a grid tens of kilometres across, and your own are deliberately absent from it — so you cannot pick yours out by elimination.

Nobody has found my bottle

Most bottles are not found. They drift, and being found needs somebody to be standing at the water near one, with the app open, at the right time. It may take months. It may never happen, and that is a real outcome rather than a fault.

If somebody does find it, you are told once, and you are not told where.

Something is in the water but I cannot reach it

The app tells you a bottle is nearby well before you are close enough to take it, so you have something to walk towards. Keep going; the distance is the whole interaction. You need to be within a few tens of metres before it will let you reach for it.

It gives you a distance and never a direction. Wandering until the number falls is intended.

I found something that should not be there

Report it from the bottle itself — open it and use the report option. You can say it is harassment, sexual content, hate, threats, self-harm, spam, or that it contains somebody's personal information, and you can add anything worth adding in your own words.

Reports are read by a person. A bottle can be taken out of the water, and an account that sends them can be stopped. If you are worried about somebody's safety rather than about the app, please contact your local emergency services — Adrift cannot help quickly enough to be the right thing to rely on.

Photographs

A bottle holds one photograph, resized on your phone before it is sent. Once a bottle is sealed, its note and its picture cannot be changed — sealing is meant to feel final. If a photograph fails to upload, seal a new bottle rather than trying to repair the old one.

Deleting your account

Settings, then Delete account. It is offered plainly and it is immediate.

What happens to what you left behind:

• Bottles already at sea keep going, with no creator attached. Somebody else's find is not yours to cancel, and a bottle in the water has stopped being anybody's.
• Notes inside bottles keep their words and lose their author. Other people are carrying those bottles, and blanking the text would tear pages out of something shared. They were always anonymous to whoever reads them, so nothing visible changes.
• Bottles you never released are retired. Nobody has seen them.
• A bottle in your hands that you never opened goes back to the water untouched. One you had already opened is retired.

Your address and your account are deleted outright. If the app tells you it did not quite finish, write to hello@tryadrift.com and it will be finished by hand.

What it costs

Nothing. There are no adverts, no subscription, nothing to buy inside it, and no paid advantage in finding or being found.

Your data

What is collected, what is not, and how to ask for a copy or its deletion is set out in the Privacy policy. The short version: an email address, the notes you write, and a coarse position for bottles under way. No name, no profile, no contacts, no advertising identifiers, and no record of who read what.