EPA's AIRNow

US Environmental Protection Agency

About this app

The AIRNow Android application will provide an increasingly mobile public with real-time air quality information that people can use to protect their health when planning their daily activities

The app will allow users to get location-specific reports on current air quality and air quality forecasts for both ozone and fine particle pollution (PM2.5). Air quality maps from the AIRNow website provide visual depictions of current and forecast air quality nationwide, and a page on air quality-related health effects explains what actions people can take to protect their health at different AQI levels, such as “code orange.”

Ratings and reviews

Clean, easy to use interface that works great! Has a very small footprint (as in kilobytes). In addition to current readings, provides forecast and map. Plus, uses a tiny amount of data (mine averages just kilobytes over several months). Unintrusive - asks for just what it needs (only GPS). Not a battery killer either, doesn't query the GPS excessively, nor will it vampire your device performance (like some apps running/communicating constantly as a background app) Bonus - doesn't have/cause ads, nag-ware, or performance issues -- even though it's free. I've used it for years, and prefer it to (getting just) the emails because it provides updated readings throughout the day. This app is one of the first things I install whenever I change mobile devices. A 'must have' for me, I use it every day!

I was a little worried about using this app after reading the comments. I downloaded it & it works well. All the information for my surrounding area is pretty accurate (sometimes the data in some points can be wrong but if you look at the surrounding areas, you will get a good reaading) If you hit the button that says smoke on the bottom left, it gives you a very detailed picture of where smoke is traveling from wildfires and where the most current wildfires are, along with air quality data.

Doesn't give real time data? I don't know. The website data is always several hours delayed. This doesn't give a time stamp of when it was last updated. Also doesn't let me see nearest monitors, and I'm in between several. Useful for doing a quick check of different places I'm traveling to though. But the website is probably easier to use, although much slower loading. And then load again to get actual monitor location data... So slow.