Why the “immutable” setting was removed from the logbook
Yes, that setting really is gone. Here I explain why I made that decision and what the law in Germany, Austria and Switzerland actually says.
Created: 16/09/2026 · Updated: September 2026
Von Florian KriescheENTWICKLER DER LOGBUCH-APP
“I’m just setting off on a new cruise and can’t find the “immutable” setting any more. I wanted to switch it on so that, if anything happens, nobody can accuse me of changing the logbook afterwards. I couldn’t find anything about it on the website. Have you changed this in the app?”
1. Why I removed this feature
Yes, I did remove this feature, because it simply didn’t work sensibly with automatic logging. If you had made a small mistake or forgotten something, you could never correct it. The result was a logbook with skewed statistics and wrong content.
What’s more, it’s perfectly acceptable to record an incident afterwards — an hour later, for example. With the old setting, that was no longer possible in the app.
2. The legal situation in Germany, Austria and Switzerland
No law in Germany, Austria or Switzerland requires the medium to be unchangeable. The rules only say that whoever keeps the logbook must not delete anything — and that applies to a paper logbook just as much as to a digital one.
I’ve written a detailed article on this: Rechtliches zum Logbuch (in German). There you’ll also see that you probably aren’t even obliged to keep a logbook at all.
3. What this means in practice
Incidentally, the restriction did stop you from changing entries directly in the app — but not from editing a CSV, PDF or GPX export before handing it to anyone.
In my view, it isn’t easy to falsify a logbook consistently after the event anyway. In the reports of the BSU (the German Federal Bureau of Maritime Casualty Investigation) that I’ve read, the main question for leisure craft is how good the seamanship was. That can’t easily be faked over a whole cruise without raising questions.