Globally, climate change has driven many catastrophic events like the huge wildfires in Australia and on the USA west coast. More and more people reached my blog to collect information about which Air Quality Monitor should invest in and which app should they download to get information about the air quality in their area.
Here are the TOP 6 Air Quality Index Apps that have helped me and others see the air, and they are free.
#1 Breathe
iOS by Tobias Tiemerding | 24MB | Free
Breathe is a great app for European citizens as it will pull data from the Sensor Community (formerly known as Luftdaten) server and will inform you in an instant about the Air Quality near you. You don’t have to own a monitor as long as there is one available in a radius of 10Km, and in case there are many monitors then it will pull data from the nearest from you. Thanks to the new update, it supports iOS 14 Widgets so you don’t even need to launch the app anymore, just place a tile into your home screen and you are ready.
#2 Local Haze
iOS by HumanLogic | 20MB | Free
Local Haze is another great app similar to the Breathe, but it combines information from many sources including the Sensor Community with over 12,000 sensors, PupleAir, and uRad Smoggies. Also, it is available globally. You can choose your favorite monitor, and it also provides the confidence rating, that way we know which measurement to trust more.
#3 BreezoMeter
iOS & Android by BreezoMeter | 71MB | In-App Purchases
BreezoMeter is the app with the most experience in the field of air quality, as the company behind it is leading the industry. Apart from air pollution data, it offers a pollen forecast for those who suffer from seasonal allergies. It uses its propitiatory AQI algorithm called BAQI to give a better insight of the air pollution in your area. Finally, it offers an air quality forecast for up to 6 hours.
#4 Plume Labs
iOS & Android by Plume Labs | 283MB | Free
Plume Labs is another app with great experience in the field of air quality. It also uses a propitiatory AQI algorithm called PAQI but the company allows users to switch between one of the major AQI algorithms like US EPA AQI, Europe CAQI, China AQI, and Abu Dhabi ADAQI. Another feature that distinguishes Plume Labs is the air quality forecast for up to 4 days. Finally, it supports dark mode.
#5 Airly
iOS & Android by Airly | 25MB | Free
Although Airly app was designed to support the Airly air quality monitors, it also supports PupleAir monitors and EPA stations and it is powered by Dark Sky service which was recently bought by Apple Inc. It supports dark mode and it is compatible with the US EPA AQI and the European AQI CAQI. Very fast responding app and visually pleasing.
#6 Live Air
iOS & Android by Origins Technology Limited | 50MB | Free
Live Air (formerly known as Kaiterra Global Air Quality) is designed as a host app for the air quality monitors of the company (Kaiterra Laser Egg series). However, the company also focuses on ambient air quality data, and with the latest update, they have managed to combine both sources of air quality information (indoor and outdoor) elegantly.
See The Air 
Thank you Sotirios for the review.
I have a comment regarding Breezometer. I find it totally inaccurate for my needs. Why? Because its AI remote sensing feature fails at reading the real values of air pollution if they have no physical monitor stations in the city where you live. Right now Breezometer tells me that the air I breathe in Athens, Greece, is clean. In reality, winter has started to arrive here too and people have already turned on their heaters and fireplaces/wood stoves. The air is far from being clean today, and Breezometer can’t detect it. It’s going to be like this for the whole winter. The mistake can be really big during days of high smoke presence. I wrote to the Breezometer guys last winter telling them what my observations in real life are, and they replied: “The reason for this is that we do not have data from monitoring stations in Greece. That means our data is heavily based on satellite-based models, which cannot account for local pollution such as fire stoves. I passed this request to our research team and I will update you soon.”
This was just to say that even though these air pollution map features look so cool, in reality they can tell you nothing of the real world without a proper web of AQ monitoring stations.
Cheers!
Andrea
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[…] low-cost network of sensors, but it also supports official data from the government agencies. Breezometer, Windy, and Apple Weather apps are also good […]
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