Spare the Air Bay Area Reviews

by Sandkuhler

I checked your app & it showed green. I went out to walk and my asthma started acting up. Checked SparetheAirBayArea again. Still green. Asthema got worse. My friend suggested I go to your website and there it was: not green. In fact 70 out of a range between 51 & 100 (green is below 51). So your app is not syncing or up to date. Whats the point if having it? Delete.

by Fire Guy

Why should I have to check before I burn? Just another lame excuse for the people at CARB to try and justify there 100,000+ salaries on useless problems, killing California economy by most trucks avoiding all all cost due to emissions related stuff. Remember when CARB poisoned us Californians with MTB in our fuel for years before they finally quietly pulled MTB out of fuels. And now there trying to justify there 100k salaries by coming after diesel because it is so harmful for the environment. What a joke!

by J Diver

SparetheAirBayArea has been neglected for years and it really needs an update. It’s outdated a lot of it doesn’t fit the screen of a modern phone.

by GoldenMaven

Fails to convince. July 1 in SF we’ve had 12 hours of yellow sky, sunless overcast. This is how Pittsburgh PA looked in the 70s - dirty yellow. SFGATE reports “red flag” air pollution. SparetheAirBayArea still gives a green flag and “NO SPARE THE AIR ALERT”.

by Justin75533

Was this a competition to see how quickly I could delete your app? You got about 45 seconds on my phone before it was gone. Completely useless.

I am a strong supporter of spare the air days and love the fact that pollution is so closely monitored and limited. With that said, I cannot think of a greater public relations failure than the Bay Area air resources management district. No one has any idea what you do, how you do it, or why. If you took even a small amount of time to actually communicate to the public about what you're doing and what the risks are if not doing it you'd gain massive support. Instead, the district and SparetheAirBayArea are a joke.

by ThatScienceGuy

Lame app. The Forecast Map page uses "Mystery Meat" type navigation. Map has some color shaded areas with no text, hints, instructions. If you click on one if the areas, it pops up a little bubble with some color coded "health" levels forecasting a couple of days out. All of them indicate some kind of level, each stuck at 2.5, regardless of severity. Clicking the Bubble gets you nothing. If you click on the "Rat out Your Neighbor's Vehicle" page and then tap the web link, it takes you to a lovely "Internal Server Error" page.

Waste of time. Deleting now.

by 1620Steve

I didn’t think is could possibly be as bad as some of the reviews were making it out to be. I was wrong! It even has a biking tab on SparetheAirBayArea ! To test it, I ask for a route from San Jose to San Francisco. It did absolutely nothing except put my location several hundred miles off of the west coast of Africa out in the ocean. App lasted for about 45 seconds on my phone. Don’t waste your time.

by Glennsallen

I've used SparetheAirBayArea to determine air-quality in the bay area for a while now and it's faster than going to the site. However, when I went to use the report smoking car feature for a horrible smoking vehicle, it totally doesn't work. Spent the time to take a picture of the license plate and write down where I was and the submit button never goes active.

by Clean Air Fan

Great concept but feed from website to app is broken. Lead screen shows spare the air alerts but clicking in the forecast shows some old data when air was clean.

Use the web page instead, not sure how many days I let kid play outside due to bad info when I should have kept her inside.

by Flyinrandy

Continues to be unable to fetch data from the server. This has been going on for weeks. Please fix the server.

by AJnSF

No place to adjust setting or set up text alerts. Says it is not working.
Needs updating!

by VaporKnight

The notifications that it is a spare the air day work well....

But when you click on areas of the map to check the air quality, the numbers are completely different than the website.

App always shows the air quality is good and in the green, when the website says it is severe and red for the same area of the Bay.

by Atl987

I just need to know if it is a spare the air day. It does that so i think it's not bad. It's free what do you want!

by TylerJP

Could SparetheAirBayArea be a bit more slick, sure. Could we debate the need for spare the air days, sure. The bottom line is that you need to know when you are going to be fined for lighting a fire. SparetheAirBayArea does just that via push. Keep up the good work app makers.

by TheOwlicious

This is a simple application but useful and doing its job pretty well

by Timware

You tap to launch it and it tells you whether or not it’s a spare the air day in the Bay Area. Not sure what the negative reviews about.

by Kieranmi

Feels much more like an iOS app than the previous version. The air quality index actually seems to work now too!

by Brumhilda

I just wanted a quick and easy way to check if it was a sta day before lighting a fire...this does that! Sure there could be more bells and whistles, I guess, but it gives me the key info I'm looking for quickly.

by GenerationFirst

I've seen a lot of reviews bashing the spare the air policies. I respect that we all may have differing opinions, but SparetheAirBayArea does exactly what it promises: you open it and right at the top it says if it's a spare the air day or not.

What else did you expect this thing to do? Sure it claims to have push notifications, but there hasn't been a STA day since I got SparetheAirBayArea so I can't comment on that. It claims to give the least smoggy bike routes, my experience has it being accurate enough. It lets you report smoking vehicles and see a forecast, but at the end of the day it has only one job: tell me if its an STA day or not!

Now, if you got SparetheAirBayArea thinking there would be a button to change civic policy or thinking that SparetheAirBayArea would allow robust and meaningful discussions surrounding a cost benefit analysis of various region wide air quality interventions, then I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news. SparetheAirBayArea is to tell you if it's a spare the air day or not. If you want more than that, in all sincerity, please write your senator and convince them to change the policy, not a bad app review to convince people that SparetheAirBayArea doesn't tell you if it's an STA day or not, because it does.

by Marengo

App does what is expected, poor reviews seem nuts or grandpa is upset at being told not to burn wood in fireplace.