Using Barometer Reborn

1. First run

The first time you open the app it checks whether your phone has a barometer and picks how it will work from then on. There is no setting for this and nothing to choose.

• A phone with a barometer measures the pressure itself. The readings are stored on the device and never need a network connection.
• A phone without a barometer — and every iPhone, for now — asks a weather service for the pressure at your location instead. This needs the location permission and an internet connection.

Onboarding then asks for two things:

1. Location. The app asks for the “while using the app” level of the permission, and it asks on every variant. It is what lets a reading be matched to one of your places, what sea level conversion takes the altitude from, and — in weather-service mode — the query itself.
2. Background monitoring. Permission for the app to take a reading every 15 minutes while you are not using it. This one is genuinely optional and can be changed at any time; see section 8 for what declining means.

2. The Air Pressure tab

The first of three tabs, and the one you will see most. It answers two questions: what is the pressure now, and which way is it going.

The gauge

The dial shows the current value in your chosen unit. Below it, the trend row says Rising, Falling or Steady, together with the exact change over the last three hours — for example +0.4 mBar over 3 hours. The three-hour window is the convention weather services use, which makes the number comparable with a forecast.

Station pressure or sea level pressure

Under the title the app says which of the two it is showing. Station pressure is the raw value where you are. Turn on sea level conversion in Settings to see the value corrected to sea level instead, which is what weather reports quote. See section 7.

The Last 24 hours card

A compact chart of the recent readings, with the place they belong to. Tap View history to open the full history screen.

Data source credit

In weather-service mode a line under the title credits the provider and its licence, for example Data: YR.NO · CC BY 4.0. The provider can differ between locations, so two of your places may legitimately show different credits. On a phone with a barometer there is no credit line, because nothing was fetched.

When something is missing

• Waiting for a reading. The app asked the sensor for one and is waiting. Give it up to 20 seconds.
• No location permission. The button says Grant permission, not Try again, because retrying without the permission cannot succeed.
• No location fix. The permission is granted but no position came back — location services may be off. Try again can genuinely help here.
• Offline. In weather-service mode, a failed refresh keeps the readings you already had and adds an offline banner. Your charts do not get wiped by one bad minute.

3. Pressure history

Reached from View history on the Air Pressure tab. Three things share one screen:

1. The place filter at the top. Pick one of your places, or the readings that are not assigned to any place.
2. The time window — 24 h, 3 d, 7 d or 30 d. The chart and the statistics both follow it.
3. The statistics under the chart: minimum, maximum and average for the window, and the total change across it.

Below that, Measurements lists every individual reading grouped by day, with its time, value, trend arrow and place. This is the raw record behind the chart.

Exporting to CSV

The share icon in the top bar, and Export CSV above the measurement list, both produce a CSV file and hand it to the system share sheet — mail it to yourself, drop it in cloud storage or open it in a spreadsheet. The export is free and not limited.

4. My Places

The second tab. Without places, every reading lands in one pile — and a weekend in the mountains will sit in the middle of your home chart, 100 hPa lower, making the whole month unreadable. A place is simply a named area whose readings are kept separate.

Adding a place

1. Tap the add button and search for the spot, or drop the pin on the map.
2. Place name — whatever you will recognise: Home, Work, Cottage.
3. Area around this place — Small (100 m), Medium (300 m) or Large (1 km). This is the radius within which a reading counts as belonging to this place.
4. Altitude is detected automatically from the location and can be corrected by hand. It is what sea level conversion uses, so it is worth a glance.
5. Tap Save.

Choosing the right area size

Larger is not better. The area is matched against your phone's location fix, and a fix that is less accurate than the radius is rejected rather than guessed at — so a 100 m area indoors, where GPS is weak, may collect less than a 300 m one. On the other hand, two places whose areas overlap will fight over the same readings. Medium is a sensible default for a home or an office; use Large for a village or a lake.

How places collect data

• On a phone with a barometer, a reading is tagged with the place you were physically inside when it was taken. A place you have added but never visited stays empty until you go there. That is the point: the data is yours, measured where you were.
• In weather-service mode, every place is fetched on every refresh regardless of where you are, so you can watch a place you have never been to.

5. Alerts

The third tab. An alert is a rule; when the rule matches, you get a notification. The tab lists your rules, each with a switch to turn it off without deleting it.

Ready-made rules

• Extreme weather change — pressure changes by more than 10 hPa within 3 hours.
• Weather change — pressure changes by more than 5 hPa within 3 hours.

Both count a change in either direction, and each can exist only once.

Custom rules

The custom editor asks five questions, in order:

1. Which place? The rule watches one place, or your current readings if you have no places.
2. What should we watch? Pressure falls, pressure rises, goes above a value, goes below a value, or stays steady.
3. When should it alert? The amount and the time window — for example falls by 5.00 mBar within 3 h.
4. Extra filter (optional). Narrows the rule to a pressure range, so you can watch for a fall only when the pressure is already low. This applies to falls, rises and steady; for goes above and goes below it is ignored, because the rule is already a level comparison.
5. Notification. The title and text you want to read when it fires. Write it for the version of you who is half asleep.

Why people use them

Two groups mostly. People whose headaches, sinuses or joints react to the weather — for whom the useful number is the size of a drop inside a window, which is precisely what a rule measures, and why the two templates sit at 5 and 10 hPa over three hours. And anglers, who watch for the sharp fall ahead of a front. The home page goes into both.

When alerts are checked

On a phone with a barometer, rules are evaluated on the device as part of each measurement — so they are checked at the same 15 minute cadence, they stop being checked if background monitoring is off, and nothing about your rules ever leaves the phone.

Without a barometer, there is no local measurement to hang the check on, so rules are evaluated on the server against the pressure series for the place, and a match arrives as a push notification. Nothing has to be running on the phone for that, but it does need a working network connection to receive it.

False alarms

An alert notification carries a Report false alarm action. It opens a screen showing the raw readings that triggered the rule — the start value, the end value and the computed difference — so you can see what the app saw. Opening it also suppresses further alert notifications for a cool-off period, so a misbehaving rule cannot spam you while you work out what happened.

6. Widget and notification

Both are Android features. iOS has neither for now.

Home screen widget

Add it the way you add any Android widget: long-press the home screen, choose Widgets, find Barometer Reborn and drag it out. Two kinds exist:

• Single value — the current pressure, nothing else. Free. The one setting is what tapping it does.
• Chart — a mini pressure trend. Choose the time frame and the colours of the series, axis, labels, title and background. Part of Platinum.

A widget redraws whenever a new reading lands, which means its cadence is the measurement cadence — not a live sensor feed.

Status bar notification

An optional permanent notification showing the current pressure, and optionally a small chart in the expanded view. Its settings cover the enable switch, what tapping it does, and for the embedded chart the time frame and its colours.

7. Units and sea level pressure

Units

Settings offers millibars (mBar), hectopascals (hPa), inches of mercury (inHg), torrs and millimetres of mercury (mmHg). Millibars and hectopascals are numerically identical — 1 mBar = 1 hPa — so the choice between them is a matter of local habit. Temperature and length units are set separately.

Mean sea level pressure

Pressure falls with altitude, by roughly 1 hPa per 8 metres near the ground. Two towns with identical weather will read very differently if one is 500 m higher. Weather reports get around this by converting every reading to what it would be at sea level, and the app can do the same.

Turn on the sea level display in Settings. The conversion needs your altitude — taken from the place you are in, or from the altitude stored in Settings when no place applies — and a temperature. Get the altitude wrong and every converted value is wrong by a constant amount, so if your sea level readings sit stubbornly a few hPa off a nearby weather station, the altitude is the first thing to check.

The gauge itself

The dial can be configured from the Air Pressure tab: the scale can follow the data automatically or use a fixed minimum and maximum you set, and the number of decimal places and divisions is yours. Several gauge designs are available, one free and the rest part of Platinum.

Outlier filtering

A single wild reading — a sensor glitch, a lift ride, a flight — can stretch a chart's scale so the real variation flattens into a line. Outlier filtering drops such readings from the charts. It is part of Platinum.

8. Background monitoring

This is the one setting worth understanding, because it decides whether the app has anything to show you.

With background monitoring on, a phone with a barometer takes a reading roughly every 15 minutes, day and night, and keeps the history for you. Alerts are checked at the same time. This is what makes the 7 day and 30 day charts meaningful.

With it off, nothing is collected while the app is closed. Opening the app still takes a reading, so the gauge works — but the history will have exactly as many points as the number of times you opened the app. This is a supported way to use the app, not a broken one; it is just a different app.

The setting is offered during onboarding and can be changed at any time in Settings. It defaults to off, so if you skipped past the onboarding step, that is where an empty chart comes from.

Battery

Reading a barometer is one of the cheapest things a phone can do — far cheaper than GPS or the screen. The app schedules its readings so Android can batch them, and asks for a location fix only when a reading actually needs to be placed or converted, rather than on every cycle. If you want to reduce it further, remove your places or switch the sea level display off, rather than turning monitoring off entirely.

Stopping monitoring

The background notification carries a Stop monitoring action. It asks for confirmation first, because stopping leaves a hole in the history that cannot be filled in afterwards.

9. Your data

• On a phone with a barometer the measurement history lives in the app's own storage on the device. It is not uploaded. Uninstalling the app deletes it.
• In weather-service mode the readings come from the server and the history is kept there per location, because the phone never measured anything itself.
• Export the whole history as CSV at any time from the history screen.
• Clear all data is available from the history screen's overflow menu, with a confirmation. It is immediate and cannot be undone.

See the privacy page for what else the app touches.

10. Troubleshooting

The chart is empty or full of gaps

1. Check that background monitoring is on in Settings.
2. Exclude the app from battery optimisation.
3. Leave it a few hours. Readings arrive every 15 minutes, so a fresh install has little to draw.

"No location permission" will not go away

If Android has stopped showing the permission dialog, tapping the button opens the app's page in system settings instead. Grant Location there and return to the app.

My readings disagree with the local weather station

Almost always the sea level setting or the altitude. A station quotes sea level pressure; your phone measures station pressure. Turn the sea level display on and check the altitude for your place. A constant offset of a few hPa is an altitude problem; a difference that changes hour to hour is not.

A new place shows nothing

On a barometer phone a place only collects while you are inside its area. Go there, or make the area larger. Also check the location permission.

My alerts never fire

1. Confirm the rule's switch is on.
2. Confirm background monitoring is on — rules are only checked when a reading is taken.
3. Check that notifications are allowed for the app in Android settings.
4. On a phone without a barometer the check happens on the server, so the phone needs a working connection to receive the push.

Something else

Write to support@hubalek.net. If it looks like a crash or a bug, the About screen shows an identifier you can quote — including it makes the report far easier to act on.