Breathable's widget tells you if the air is safe enough to go outside

News
By Oliver Haslam
published

Breathable On Iphone
Breathable On Iphone (Image credit: Karbon)

What you need to know

  • Breathable is a simple app that puts an air quality widget onto your Home screen.
  • A portion of the $1.99 app's proceeds are donated to climate change foundations.

If you happen to live in a part of the world that struggles with air quality it can sometimes be difficult to know when it's safe to go outside. That's what Breathable is here to help with — by putting a simple widget onto your Home screen that tells you the current air quality situation wherever you are.

Available for iPhone, iPad, and even Mac, Breathable as an app is really only there to give you a way to configure the widget. And customization is part of the fun, too.

Customize how your widgets look by changing fonts, showing or hiding various bits of information, or by using Breathable's Emoji Scale to soften the reality of the smoky air around you. Customize Emoji Scale using one of our provided sets or choose your own emoji for each scale value!

Breathable uses two different services for its data collection and the app makes it easy to find the right location for air quality monitoring — it's based on latitude and longitude coordinates, you see. But don't worry, you can search using postal codes and more, too.

Breathable is available for download from the App Store right now and is priced at just $1.99. Even more impressive is the fact a portion of the proceeds will be donated to three climate change foundations.

  • Clean Air Task Force (catf.us)
  • Climate Change Emergency Fund (climateemergencyfund.org)
  • Union of Concerned Scientists (ucsusa.org)

Want to know what the air quality is like inside your home? There are some great HomeKit air quality sensors out there that will more than do the job. Thanks to John Gruber for pointing me in the direction of Breathable, too!

Oliver Haslam
Oliver Haslam
Contributor

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too.

Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.