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

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.

Needs notifications and alerts. It's also a fair amount of clicks/taps to get to sensors near you if you're not close to an official EPA sensor. Purple Air sensors are shown on the map, and you can favorite them, but they don't show in your dashboard: you have to go back to the map and navigate to the specific sensor again. EPA, please make this app more useful for the public's primary use case --notifications.

Would be cool if they provided trends so you can see changes over the past week from recorded data. I don't mind checking a couple times every day, but if the data exists, why not make it available and easy to see? I'd rather not write a program to collect hourly data from the website... But if I have to, I might... Maybe the devs should just make this a quick feature like a chart or something.