Home Screen widgets
Portholes into one living deep sea
Bathysphere turns your widgets into brass portholes. Glowing creatures glide past the glass in real, continuous motion, and everyone on Earth is looking into the same water at the same moment.
Free, for iPhone with iOS 26 or later. No ads, no in-app purchases, and nothing to sign up for.
Behind the glass
Portholes share the water
Line up portholes in a Home Screen row, give them the same depth, and set each one's Position in Edit Widget. A siphonophore that drifts out of one porthole turns up in the next, after slipping behind your app icons.
One ocean for everyone
The sea is worked out from the current UTC time, so every Bathysphere on Earth shows the same creature at the same moment. There is no server. Every iPhone does the same arithmetic.
Tap the glass
Tap a porthole on your Home Screen and a flash fires. Whatever is passing goes into your field journal as a painted naturalist plate, with its name, its depth and a NEW badge the first time you catch it.
The Leviathan
Once every UTC day it passes every porthole. The Almanac announces the time in advance. Be watching.
Who swims past
21 species in three zones, every one of them drawn in light.
Twilight
200 to 1,000 m
- Lanternfish
- Hatchetfish
- Firefly squid
- Giant siphonophore
- Glass squid
- Sperm whale rare
Midnight
1,000 to 4,000 m
- Anglerfish
- Atolla jellyfish
- Comb jelly
- Stoplight loosejaw dragonfish
- Vampire squid
- Gulper eel rare
Abyss
4,000 to 6,000 m
- Dumbo octopus
- Sea pig
- Tripod fish
- Snailfish rare
Four legends
Fish that William Beebe reported from his Bathysphere dives off Bermuda in 1932 and 1934. No one has confirmed them since: the five-lined constellationfish, the pallid sailfin, the untouchable bathysphere fish and the abyssal rainbow gar.
One myth
The Leviathan. It was made up for Bathysphere, and it keeps its appointments.
Where to watch
- Home Screen. Porthole comes in three sizes: a small round porthole, a wide medium viewport, and the large captain's porthole, whose brass plaque counts down to the next sighting.
- Lock Screen. Sonar sweeps for creatures closing in on your portholes. Depth Log shows the next sighting with a live countdown, and its inline version tells you when the Leviathan is due.
- Control Center. The Flash control photographs every porthole at once.
- The app. Dive into a full-screen live porthole with optional hydrophone ambience. Page through your Journal, where species you have not found yet wait as silhouettes. Plan with the Almanac and tap Remind me for a local notification. Set up your Portholes and save a matching hull wallpaper. In Settings, choose Smooth, Calm or Automatic motion.
- Accessibility. With Reduce Motion on, portholes hold a still scene. VoiceOver describes what is passing, and the app supports Dynamic Type.
Data Not Collected
Bathysphere works offline and makes no network requests. There is no account, no analytics and no tracking. Your journal stays on your iPhone.