Questions and straight answers

No, not any more. A phone with a barometer measures the pressure itself and keeps the history on the device. A phone without one asks a weather service for the pressure at your location. The app detects which case it is on the first run and there is nothing to configure. Older versions of the app really did require the sensor; that restriction is gone.

Install the app and open it. If the Air Pressure tab shows a data source credit under the title, the readings are coming from a weather service, which means no sensor was found. No credit line means your phone is measuring it.

Current Android releases. The app has been on Google Play since 2016 and has been kept up to date with each platform version since; Google Play will tell you if your device is not compatible before you install.

The app runs on Android tablets. There is no dedicated Wear OS app.

On a phone with a barometer, every 15 minutes when background monitoring is on, plus once whenever you open the app. Extra requests within five minutes of the last reading are ignored, so nothing is measured twice for no reason. Without a barometer nothing is measured on the phone at all — the cadence is the weather service's, and the app reflects its series as it updates.

Because you are comparing two different quantities. A weather station publishes pressure converted to sea level; your phone measures the raw pressure where it physically is. Pressure falls by roughly 1 hPa per 8 metres, so a third floor flat already reads lower than the street. Turn on the sea level display and check the altitude stored for your place. A constant offset is an altitude problem. An offset that changes through the day is not, and is usually just real weather moving between the two locations.

Accurate enough for trends, which is what matters here. Phone pressure sensors are good at detecting change and less good at absolute calibration, so the shape of the curve is reliable even when the absolute value sits a little off. If you need an absolute match with an official station, use the sea level display and a correct altitude.

Millibars (mBar), hectopascals (hPa), inches of mercury (inHg), torrs and millimetres of mercury (mmHg). Millibars and hectopascals are the same number; the choice is regional habit.

Individual measurements can be deleted from the history list. Platinum also includes outlier filtering, which drops such readings from the charts automatically — useful if you take lifts, drive through mountains or fly.

It can give you the data and tell you when the pressure moves. Studies of migraine sufferers report attacks clustering after pressure drops, with sensitivity commonly described somewhere around 5 to 10 hPa, and what seems to matter most is how fast the drop happens rather than the absolute value. The two ready-made alert rules sit at exactly those thresholds — more than 5 hPa, and more than 10 hPa, within 3 hours — and a custom rule takes any amount and any window if yours is different. The app is not a medical device and diagnoses nothing; the reason the history and the CSV export matter is that a few weeks of your own readings next to your own notes beat any population average.

The pattern anglers describe is a sharp fall ahead of an approaching front — the classic feeding window, before the front arrives and the bite shuts down — and then a slow spell while the barometer is still moving, followed by good fishing once it settles. A practical setup: add the water as a place so its readings stay separate, create a custom pressure falls rule at around 3 to 4 hPa over 6 hours to catch the front coming, and use the 3 day chart to see the whole system pass. Pressure is a signpost for light, wind and temperature moving together, which is why it tracks the fishing as well as it does.

No, and it deliberately does not claim to. It shows the pressure, its history and the size of recent changes, and it can notify you when a change crosses a threshold you chose. Interpreting that is up to you.

Keeping readings taken in different locations apart. Without them, a weekend at altitude drops a canyon into the middle of your home chart and the ordinary day-to-day variation becomes invisible. Each place gets its own chart.

On a phone with a barometer, a place collects readings only while you are physically inside its area — that is what makes the data yours rather than an estimate. Visit it, enlarge the area, and check that the location permission is granted. In weather-service mode every place is fetched wherever you are, so an empty place there points at the network or the permission instead.

Medium (300 m) for a home or an office, Large (1 km) for a village or a lake. Small (100 m) is precise but demanding: a location fix less accurate than the radius is rejected rather than guessed at, and indoor fixes often are. Avoid overlapping areas — two places competing for the same readings helps nobody.

Only for sea level conversion. It is detected automatically when you add a place and can be corrected by hand. If you never turn the sea level display on, the altitude does not affect anything you see.

They are kept as unassigned, and the history screen's place filter has an entry for them. Nothing is thrown away.

Yes, but the check happens in a different place. On a phone with a barometer the rules are evaluated on the device as each measurement is taken, so nothing about them leaves the phone. Without a barometer there is no local measurement to hang the check on, so they are evaluated on the server against the pressure series for the place and arrive as a push notification.

On a phone with a barometer, check in this order: the rule's own switch is on; background monitoring is on, because rules are only checked when a reading is taken; notifications are allowed for the app in Android's settings; and the app is excluded from battery optimisation. Without a barometer the check runs on the server, so the two things to verify are notification permission and a working connection.

Use the Report false alarm action on the notification. It shows the actual readings behind the alert — the start value, the end value, the difference — so you can see what triggered it, and it silences further alerts for a cool-off period while you adjust the rule.

Yes. Choose the place, the condition (falls, rises, goes above, goes below, stays steady), the amount and the time window, an optional pressure range filter, and the wording of the notification you will receive.

Reading a barometer is one of the cheapest operations a phone performs — orders of magnitude below GPS or the display. Readings are scheduled so Android can batch them, and a location fix is requested only when a reading actually needs to be placed or converted, rather than on every cycle.

Android 12 and newer require a visible notification while an app collects data in the background. It is not optional on those versions. You can make it quieter through Android's per-app notification settings.

Either background monitoring is off — it defaults to off, and is offered during onboarding — or the system killed the background work. Excluding the app from battery optimisation fixes the second case on most phones.

Yes, and it is a supported way to use it. The gauge takes a reading whenever you open the app. The history will simply contain one point per visit.

On a phone with a barometer, no. The measurements stay in the app's storage on the device. In weather-service mode there is nothing measured on the phone to upload; the readings come from the server and the history is kept there per location.

The app asks for the “while using the app” level of the permission, on every variant. It needs it to match a reading to one of your places, to take the altitude that sea level conversion uses, and — in weather-service mode — to know which location to fetch the pressure for at all. It is used to place a reading, not to build a movement history.

Yes, as CSV, from the history screen, for free. Clear all data in the same screen's menu deletes everything, immediately and permanently.

The free version shows ads, and consent for personalised advertising is requested where the law requires it. Crash reporting and usage analytics help find bugs. Platinum removes the ads. See the privacy page.

The pressure gauge and trend, the full history with statistics, all units, sea level conversion, CSV export and the single value home screen widget.

Unlimited places and alert rules, the chart widget and notification customization, gauge designs and themes, outlier filtering, and no ads.

No. Platinum Edition is a one-time purchase.

Where the option is offered, watching a rewarded ad permanently unlocks one additional place or alert slot. Platinum unlocks them all at once.

No. Purchases are tied to your Google account and are restored when you sign in with the same account. If something is still missing, write to support@hubalek.net.

It is in preparation and not on the App Store yet. There is no date to promise.

The same screens and the same code underneath. At launch it runs in weather-service mode, so it needs the location permission and a connection, and it has no home screen widget yet. Alerts work, evaluated on the server. The comparison table on the home page lists the differences.

The iOS app does not read the sensor yet — the local measurement pipeline is Android-only for now. It is the obvious next step, not a decision to leave it out.