Frequently asked questions

A one-thumb fishing game for iPhone with a real fishery simulated underneath it. You pick a water, pick a rig, read the conditions and fish. Every one of the 240+ species has a depth band, a feeding clock and a water temperature it wants, so what you catch depends on where, when and how you fish.

The game is free to download and free to play all the way through. There are optional in-app purchases that top up your in-game wallet or unlock three premium boats, and nothing else is gated behind them. There are no ads and no energy timers.

An iPhone running iOS 16 or later. It is an iPhone app — it will run on an iPad in iPhone compatibility mode, but it is not built for that screen. Menus rotate freely; the water itself locks to portrait, because the lake, the camera and the controls are all designed around a tall screen.

Thirteen: English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Russian, Arabic and Turkish. It follows your iPhone's language setting automatically.

No. The whole game runs on your phone — airplane mode plays exactly the same. A connection is only needed for two optional things: making an App Store purchase, and Game Center leaderboards if you choose to sign in.

Tap and hold anywhere on the water to cast. Holding also moves the boat, so you can reposition before you commit. With a bobber rig, the − and + controls set how deep the bait rides.

Usually one of four things is off:

• Depth. The fish you want lives in a band. A bluegill will not come down to the bottom, and a walleye will not come up to the surface at noon.
• Hour. Dawn and dusk turn on the low-light feeders; catfish and walleye go at night.
• Temperature. Water temperature moves with the location, the hour, the weather and the depth. Cold-water fish leave warm water entirely.
• The rig. Half the fish in the game ignore a crab jig; the other half fight over it. Check the Fish-o-pedia entry for what a species actually eats.

Chum is the blunt instrument when all four are close but nothing is committing.

Because each one is fished the way its real counterpart is. A spinnerbait needs you to hold to retrieve. A nymph fishes itself and dies the moment you drag it. A dry fly has to be twitched or nothing looks at it. A crankbait digs down as you reel and floats back up when you stop. A flutter spoon gets hit on the fall. The in-game description for each rig tells you how to work it.

Hold to reel and keep line tension in the gold. Push into the red and you burn through your line. When a big fish runs, let it take line rather than fighting it — it will tire. Big fish sound for the bottom, shake their heads and finally roll onto their side when they are beaten.

The minnow trap restocks live minnows, which the minnow rig and the cut bait rig both consume. The critter trap catches the rest of your live bait. Chum draws fish toward the boat for a while — it is what you throw when the pattern is right but the fish are not committing.

Ten of the twelve waters are unlocked once and yours forever. Two are licensed instead, the way the real places are: Cataloochee Creek sells a 12-hour permit, and Cabo San Lucas is a 24-hour big-game charter. You pay in in-game cash, fish as much as you like inside that window, and buy another when it lapses — or extend it early, which adds the time onto what you have left rather than wasting it. Neither one takes real money, and neither is required to finish the game.

A skill contest inside the game, found under Missions. The entry fee is paid in in-game cash and it pays out in in-game cash. There is no real-money entry and nothing of real value is won — it is not gambling, and there are no odds-based mechanics anywhere in the game.

Rod, reel, line and hooks, each of which changes how you fish rather than just adding a number. Boats run from a kayak up to a lake cruiser and decide how far out and how deep you can work. On top of that there are twelve waters to unlock, fourteen rigs to work through, a trophy room to fill and a Fish-o-pedia with an entry for every species in the game.

Each of the twelve waters holds one, and it lives deep. Legendaries do everything the ordinary fish do — charge, flee, sound, chew line, grind out a long fight — all at once. You will want the gear before you go looking.

Two kinds of thing, and nothing else:

• Wallet top-ups (consumable) — Stack of Cash, Bag of Cash, Briefcase of Cash, Crate of Cash and The Vault, plus a one-time Starter Bundle that also includes chum, worms and a minnow trap.
• Premium boats (non-consumable, yours forever) — the Jet Ski, the Party Pontoon and The Golden Gill.

Prices are set per country by the App Store and are shown in your own currency in the Cash Shop before you confirm anything.

No. Every water, rig, upgrade and non-premium boat can be earned by fishing. Cash packs skip grind; they do not unlock content that is otherwise out of reach. The three premium boats are cosmetic-plus-convenience hulls, not a requirement.

Open the Cash Shop by tapping the money chip at the top left of the main menu, then tap Restore Purchases at the bottom. Premium boats come straight back. Cash packs are delivered by Apple and can lag on a poor connection — if one still has not landed after a few minutes on good signal, tell me which item and roughly when and it will be sorted out.

That message means the app could not reach the App Store to load prices. Check your connection, make sure you are signed in to the App Store on the device, then reopen the shop. It resolves itself as soon as the App Store answers.

Every purchase runs through Apple, so Apple handles refunds. Go to reportaproblem.apple.com, sign in with the Apple Account that made the purchase, and choose the item. The developer cannot issue App Store refunds directly. If Apple revokes or refunds a premium boat, the game removes it the next time it checks.

Use Apple's own controls, which the game cannot override: on the child's device open Settings → Screen Time → Content & Privacy Restrictions → iTunes & App Store Purchases and set In-app Purchases to Don't Allow. With Family Sharing you can also turn on Ask to Buy so every purchase needs your approval first.

No. In-game cash exists only inside Reel Rush Fishing, cannot be transferred between accounts or devices, cannot be cashed out, and has no value outside the game. See the Terms of Use.

On your device, in the app's own storage. There is no server and no account. Money, upgrades, unlocked waters, records, the Fish-o-pedia and your settings all live there.

No. There is no iCloud sync, so each device keeps its own separate save. Your purchased premium boats are tied to your Apple Account rather than the save, so Restore Purchases brings those to any device you sign in on.

Yes, if you move it the way iOS moves everything else: an encrypted iTunes or Finder backup, an iCloud device backup, or a direct device-to-device transfer during setup all carry the save with them. Reinstalling the app by itself on a fresh phone starts you over.

Settings (the gear at the top right of the main menu) → Reset all progress. It asks for confirmation, and it cannot be undone. Premium boats you paid for survive the reset; if one does not reappear, use Restore Purchases.

Deleting the app deletes the save with it, permanently, unless it is inside a device backup. Purchases are not lost — they are attached to your Apple Account and come back with Restore Purchases.

Three, all global: biggest fish, total catches and lifetime earnings. Your scores are submitted after a catch is banked. Open them from the Trophy Room.

No, and the game never blocks on it. If you are not signed in, nothing is submitted and nothing is shown — everything else plays exactly the same. Sign-in is offered only when you tap Global Leaderboards in the Trophy Room.

Scores post in the background after you bank a catch and need a connection to land. Bank one more catch while online and it should catch up. Game Center itself is run by Apple — if it is having a bad day, the game cannot do anything about it, which is exactly why nothing in the game depends on it.

Sign out in Settings → Game Center on your iPhone. The game will simply stop submitting scores.

None. There are no accounts, no analytics, no telemetry, no advertising identifiers and no third-party SDKs. The app's App Store privacy answer is "no data collected", and its privacy manifest declares exactly one storage API — the one that saves your game on your own device. The full privacy policy spells it out.

No. There is no ad network in the app at all, and no rewarded video.

One, and only if you keep playing: after a few catches the game asks whether it may send notifications, so it can post a single daily reminder at 9am that your daily reward is waiting. Say no and nothing changes about the game. You can change your mind any time in Settings → Notifications → Reel Rush. It never asks for location, camera, microphone, photos or contacts, because it never uses them.

It is rated 4+. Cartoon fish are caught, kept and sold; there is no violence, no chat, no user-generated content and no way for anyone to contact your child through the game. The one thing to be aware of is in-app purchases — see how to switch those off.

Force-quit and reopen first — your progress is saved continuously, so you lose at most the cast you were on. If it happens again, send a report with your iPhone model, your iOS version, which water you were fishing and what you were doing. Enabling Settings → Privacy & Security → Analytics & Improvements → Share With App Developers on your iPhone lets Apple pass along an anonymous crash log, which makes a fix far quicker.

Yes — Settings (the gear at the top right of the main menu) has separate switches for sound effects, haptics, and the heavier catch-and-reel rumble.

The water is animated continuously, so it works the GPU the way any live game does. Turning off haptics helps a little, and Low Power Mode caps the frame rate, which helps more. Nothing runs in the background when you leave the app.

Please do — use the contact form and pick "Feature idea". Species requests that come with a real depth range and a real feeding pattern are the easiest ones to say yes to.