Airthings

I use this app on my iPhone, and it is a terrific smart home addition. In one home I have an ongoing radon concern, so this gives me peace of mind that my mitigation is working. In my vacation home, with the latest update, I can set my own alert levels, so it now functions as a warning that my furnace has stopped working. I also have CO2 issues in the summer when the a/c is on and the house closed up, so this reminds me to open a door or window from time to time. I keep these devices on power, using the battery as backup. One of my devices failed after a year or so, and customer service replaced it promptly. As a smart home advocate, I am a big fan of these. If I’m starting to sound like the owner of the company or a paid reviewer (I’m neither), well that’s what happens when I find a good device.

Although the hardware seems to work well, the app is grossly lacking in basic features and repeated updates to app only make it worse and remove features or cause previously functional features to no longer work. Worse yet, the lifetime “average” of radon level is wrong and lies, says radon is lower then it actually is. As a person who has worked in data analysis I can tell you the calculation of the average is wrong which endangers anyone who trusts the lifetime average. Shameful. Also, if the device goes offline, it only stores a few hours of data and worse, you get no notification the device is off-line, so you can loose hours, days or even weeks of data if you don’t check the app daily. All of these issues would be easy to fix if they chose to. Lastly, the app has notifications when certain levels get to set points but the set points are not adjustable, Airthings assumes everyone wants the same exact set points, for example temperature. Unfortunately there are no alternatives available. Numerous contacts with their tech support have resulted in no changes or support.

I was disappointed when I was finally forced to switch over from the older app to this newer version. In my opinion, the older/previous app was far better for quickly reviewing trends among monitored variables and much easier to see what might be changing with air quality, temperature or humidity. This new version has horrible plotting that constantly rescales the Y axis of the plots when you click to examine a single variable. This means it’s not possible to see extremes easily because as you scroll back in time the axis shifts. This is fine as an option but at least give me the option to keep the axis from rescaling or set my own bounds. I hate the new way you scroll to see values over time; I just want to select where I want values not have to roll my way to it. The new time summary doesn’t actually provide you a graph over the time length of interest in the original measurement frequency, instead it seems to do some sort data/time averaging for that length of time but then give you only a few days view, always with the current time centered in the graph. Ex if I request a 7 day window of data I will initially see only 3 days averaged using, I assume, some sort of moving window. If I then scroll left I still can only see 6 days at a time max?! 30 days same issue, averaged instead of showing me 30days of data. And the Y axis always rescaling. Also the old app let you scroll up and down to quickly see patterns in the data whereas now you have to exit one variable and click on another and try to remember where you wanted to compare two variables. Far less effective at seeing relationships visually now. Designed to be flashy without the consultation of a data scientist