How to import dives from a Shearwater dive computer

Worth knowing

• No driver install exists or is needed. Shearwater has always used Bluetooth, never a USB-serial cable, so there is nothing equivalent to a CP210x or FTDI driver anywhere on their site. The OS Bluetooth stack is the whole transport.
• The generation split is Bluetooth Classic vs BLE, not cable vs wireless. Predator, Petrel 1 and NERD 1 are Bluetooth Classic only. Shearwater states plainly that these will never connect to an iPhone, and will not connect to a Mac running Monterey or newer. Their advice is to borrow an Android phone, tablet or Windows PC to pull the dives, then view them on Apple hardware afterwards.
• There are two live apps, and they are not interchangeable. Shearwater Cloud (Windows, macOS, iOS, Android) is the mature one and the only one that reads the full legacy model range. Dive Shearwater is the new mobile-only app and Shearwater says Cloud will eventually be deprecated in its favour.
• Only Shearwater Cloud Desktop can produce a file. Its release notes confirm export to DAN DL7, UDDF, CSV, Shearwater XML and SQLite, plus a whole-database export/import used for moving accounts. The mobile builds sync to the cloud rather than write dive files.
• Dive Shearwater has no import at all. Shearwater's own FAQ says there is no UDDF import option in the app, and there is no desktop or tablet build. Anyone wanting a portable file must stay on Shearwater Cloud Desktop.
• Migrating from Shearwater Cloud to Dive Shearwater is one-way and one-time. After it runs, edits in either app stop appearing in the other, and initial migration can take up to 20 minutes. Password resets are also independent between the two apps, and a Cloud password must be reset inside Cloud before the first Dive Shearwater login.
• The Dive Shearwater model lists differ by platform in a way that trips people up: iOS reaches Perdix and Petrel 2, Android does not. Owners of those two models on Android still need Shearwater Cloud.
• Perdix 3 changed the pairing model. It uses a secure bonded pairing where a code must match on both the watch and the app, and it can only hold an active pairing with one Shearwater app at a time, so switching from phone to desktop requires disconnecting first and sometimes clearing the pairing from the OS Bluetooth settings too.
• The pre-Cloud application, Shearwater Desktop 3.1.5, is dead. Shearwater says it may still run but is no longer supported and no longer offers it for download; only third-party mirrors carry it. Users are told to move to Shearwater Cloud 2.10.2 or later, which can import the old application's dives.
• Predator, Pursuit, Petrel 1 and NERD 1 are end-of-service-life hardware. Shearwater no longer stocks raw components for them and handles repairs case by case.
• The desktop download links on shearwater.com are JavaScript redirects (downloads.shearwater.com/filedirect.html) rather than direct file links, so they need a real browser. The underlying installer URLs carry the version number and change with every release.
• On macOS, recent Apple updates can force a re-sign-in to Shearwater Cloud that makes the logbook look empty; Shearwater publishes a dedicated recovery PDF for this.
• No account is strictly required to pull dives off a computer. Shearwater Cloud has a guest mode, and guest dives can be transferred into an account later. An account is only needed for cross-device sync and for migrating to Dive Shearwater.
• If firmware updates or connections fail, the vendor's standard fix is to switch Settings > Bluetooth Options from the newer Dive Computer mode back to Legacy UI, and to make sure the computer's own firmware is current, since old firmware breaks compatibility with current Shearwater Cloud releases.