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Air quality reporting on iOS
- hombre_fatal 3y agoInteresting. This seems like the reasonable way to do it. What global scale would you pick otherwise? And would it be sensitive enough to show gradients in the least/most polluted countries and cities or would it just fill them in with one color?
- treffer 3y agoAnd the image shows that the scale is named differently. So very likely tied to the most common national air quality scale. So it's explicit in what it shows.
- amelius 3y agoAren't these countries both in the EU? I'd expect an EU-wide scale.
- mikerg87 3y agoYou are correct they should both be using the Common Air Quality Index (CAQI). There is a new standard the EAQI and perhaps Germany has already switched to that standard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_quality_index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_quality_index
- yosito 3y agoI use US AQI, and hadn't really realized that many countries have their own measurement. I also usually look at µg/m3 of PM2.5, which is a universal standard, but of course doesn't tell the whole story of air quality.
- owl110 3y agoI think the problem is that the colors have different meaning. The values in the screenshot for Amsterdam using the NL scale translates to 'insufficient' and while the DE scale translates to 'good' for the same city at the same time. At the very least, it means that a user cannot use these scales for inference without knowing/understanding the technology behind them. This is probably not the intention behind showing an air quality indicator in the iOS app.
- joshgachnang 3y agoThe colors having different meanings shouldn't come up in typical cases, because who's looking at their air quality map from two different countries? There's also a key to the upper left. It's interesting and well designed IMO. I don't think this actually causes issues for any users.
- capitainenemo 3y agoThe difficulty seems to be that depending on what country you are in, the colours you are used to will have different meanings. Hopefully the german definition of good air quality isn't too overly optimistic, or someone with actual health issues might get a surprise if they are used to being ok on days with a certain "colour" when traveling.
- hombre_fatal 3y agoWell, they said the AQ for NL was “insufficient” but the same value was “good” according to Germany. So it’s not just different colors, it’s different standards for AQ. I guess you’re proposing that the AQ meter always use the scale of your home country. Doesn’t seem unreasonable but also seems like a quibble so tiny that it could be defeated if someone more knowledgeable offered a single reason against it.
- capitainenemo 3y agoHm. That seemed unnecessarily contentious. We were largely in agreement. Yes, the german one is using more lax standards, as I was saying, hopefully not too lax, but yes, the colours indicate entirely different standards. And yes, I think a simple solution would be to use the colour of your home country that you are used to. Presumably if you moved, you could just learn the standards of your new country. A consistent standard that you can rely on in your phone when on a trip to another country definitely seems more useful if you are actually relying on this iOS app. It could be a simple app pref, a little toggle switch..
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- davidkuennen 3y agoI'm also curious why there's no data for countries like Belgium, Switzerland and Austria.
- Havoc 3y agoI mean tech is full of conflicting standards. (see relevant xkcd...) In this particular case the actual values just happen to land on the edge of two colours in the scales with very different connotations - orange vs green.
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- Arn_Thor 3y agoThat’s why I like Air Matters. You can choose your scale
- DangerousPie 3y agoI have never understood how to interpret AQI in iOS. Confusingly, the UI will (edit: or at least used to?) say "Air Quality: Low" when what it means is that the pollution level is low (ie. air quality is high). Somewhat disappointing coming from Apple.
- evanriley 3y agoHmm, what country does this happen in? I've never seen it use Low/High, only from Good to Hazardous.
- DangerousPie 3y agoIn the UK for example.
- cjrp 3y agoRight now mine says “Air pollution: low. Air quality index is 3”. Apparently using the DAQI for classification
- DangerousPie 3y agoHuh, looks like you're right. Maybe they fixed it at some point?
- jsjohnst 3y agoSame for me in US English. For example, right now it’s “18 - Good”. It was “469 - Hazardous” just three weeks ago though.
- mensetmanusman 3y ago'This air quality level is known to cause cancer in California'
- dylan604 3y ago“I noticed something strange in the iOS weather app” I’ve noticed that the weather app on my iOS, iPadOS, and watchOS all show differing forecasts with all 3 devices within 18” of each other. AQI is just one of the parts of the forecast that I just don’t pay attention too. Around here in the summer, it is always an alert saying don’t go outside
- SkyPuncher 3y agoI’m giving up on Apple Weather (despite recently saying it was fine). I got burned this past weekend when painting my deck. Forecast was absolutely clear in the window I needed to paint/dry. Just after I started, forecast changed to nearly 100% rain this wasn’t a case of “oh maybe the chance of rain was wrong”. No, it went from 0 to having a hundred of mile wide storm pass through. The type of storm that doesn’t just pop up. It’s insane how they killed dark sky.
- sp332 3y agoThe past week has been super weird. My local weather station kept predicting rain every day and it barely rained at all. This week, once again, they say thunderstorms every day. We'll see how it goes.
- jeffgreco 3y agoBy killing Dark Sky and their own weather app and pushing me to an annual CARROT Weather subscription, they made themselves a profit of 30% of the CARROT Weather subscription -_-
- 404mm 3y agoSomewhat related, Apple’s Air Quality data source (breezometer) is now owned by Google. I wonder what Apple is going to do about it. Will it be just one of their data sources or are they going to acquire their own?
- booi 3y agoIs this really an issue? I bet Apple users use gmail too.
- speedgoose 3y agoThey also use Google Search by default.
- 404mm 3y agoI don’t know. That’s not for me to judge :). I am just pointing it out because they seemed to have an issue with a similar concept in the past (Maps… moving to their own product). Unlike Google as their default search engine, accessing weather or air quality API costs money. (While they probably get paid for keeping Google as their default search engine)
- zitterbewegung 3y agoSince its Google, Apple will probably be forced to do something once Google kills it off.
- lotsofpulp 3y agoI am curious how reliable that air quality data is in the first place. I cannot find anything about Breezometer having invested in installing air quality meters all around the world. https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/sycbrdpbi https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/sycbrdpbi This article says they are using “machine learning” and “AI”. Makes me think it is all fake. https://www.breezometer.com/pdfs/Ultimate-Guide-to-BreezoMeter_s-Air-Quality-Technology.pdf https://www.breezometer.com/pdfs/Ultimate-Guide-to-BreezoMet... Their own documentation indicates the air quality measures they provide are just guesses based on their models. Page 4 basically says actually measuring particulates in the air is very costly, and so their solution is to come up with models to predict what it might be.
- can16358p 3y agoI've never ever seen air quality in iOS. Probably not available where I live. You guys at least, well, have it.
- smileybarry 3y agoApple don't have it enabled for all regions, even if Breezometer have data there. (E.g.: looks like they have [fairly good] data here [in Israel], but AQI is disabled in Apple Maps)
- almokhtar 3y agoyou mean palestine ?
- pridkett 3y agoYou might have to dig for it - I didn’t know this feature was available before this post. You need to click on the map button then toggle the air quality layer. Seems to cover most of the US, Canada, Mexico. Western Europe is largely present but is missing a handful of countries (Belgium, Luxembourg, Ireland, Switzerland, Austria, Liechtenstein, Portugal, and Iceland). Also covers most of Japan and South Korea and small localized portions of India and China.
- can16358p 3y agoWell I live in Turkey so it doesn't seem covered.
- bilekas 3y agoIn Italy I have noticed that the air quality is usually considered bad only in places that actually have data. For a lot of the places that are considered good, checking the sources for them usually result in only 1 device. It's a nice to have certainly but I wish it was more consistent.
- studmuffin650 3y agoAs someone who just visited Italy for the first time in 10 years, I was surprised how polluted the air was (especially around the coast). While the air quality was marked as “OK”, it was quite hazy and you could actually see the smog in the air. Just something that really took me by surprise as when I think of polluted areas, the Amalfi coast is not an area that comes to mind
- apwheele 3y agoOf interest to folks looking at this post -- Chris Said has a deeper dive on US air quality metrics and their provenance, https://chris-said.io/2023/06/19/the-air-quality-index-doesnt-make-any-sense/ https://chris-said.io/2023/06/19/the-air-quality-index-doesn.... The attempt to make things easy to interpret using a nice relative scale ends up in the end make them very opaque to interpret the number itself in any meaningful way.
- mrob 3y agoThe "inexplicable" addition of 0.4 to the round multiples of 50 looks like it's there to stop people claiming that limits apply after rounding to the nearest fifty. If the threshold is 50, people might claim 74 is acceptable because it rounds to 50. If the threshold is 50.4 this is obviously false.
- sandworm101 3y ago>> I noticed something strange in the iOS weather app: The air quality index seems to be defined relative to the country from which one accesses the air quality map. Yup. And if you look closely the underlying map also sometimes changes based on which country one is standing in (Crimea/Taiwan). Services like iOS are not scientific but consumer and government-focused services. They exist to appease a host of interested parties, not to render dispassionate information.
- brookst 3y agoMany products have multiple stakeholders. I can't think of a single product that exists "to render dispassionate information" and nothing else.
- verelo 3y agoI guess you don’t own a TV /s
- wahnfrieden 3y agoTo recognize stakeholders says nothing of their power dynamics. You're obfuscating by generalizing
- crazygringo 3y agoReally not sure what your point is? The temperature and humidity values that iOS Weather reports are objective and "dispassionate", no? Likewise wind speed and so forth? AQI is unique in this case, in that it is a color-coded interpretation of combining multiple underlying objective values (PM2.5, etc.). And different governments have chosen different official national schemes for this, according to what they want the population to consider "normal"/green. Which means that air-polluting industry in one country might lobby for a wider "green" band. Nothing like that is happening around temperature or humidity as far as I'm aware on iOS. (Though I do believe Beijing had a history of under-reporting official maximum daytime summer temperatures, since people couldn't work outdoors above a certain threshold.)
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- zerealshadowban 3y agoI've been using the PurpleAir website (map.purpleair.com) for many years now, mostly out of concern for heavy wildfire pollution and winter inversions vs personal outdoor+athletic activities; one interesting aspect is that you can buy your own sensor and thus join the community of local sensors for increased accuracy of measurements. They let you pick between various international standards and types of pollutants. They seem to have a dense network of sensors in North America, not sure about the rest of the world.
- nullindividual 3y agoI should be able to translate what my local government/news says about air quality, just like any other portion of the weather forecast (C, F, etc). Information based on user locality seems like an excellent design.
- 908B64B197 3y ago> what my local government/news says about air quality That's assuming the local government is giving the truth regarding air quality and that their "official scale" is made to reflect reality and not obscure some measurements.
- nullindividual 3y agoLet's not go there. Unsubstantiated conspiracy theories do not add to this discussion.
- bluecalm 3y agoA Government massaging the data to make the situation look better than it is doesn't qualify as a conspiracy theory. Rather as expected outcome if anything. The point is that the raw data is always the most valuable. Translating it is an easy task that can be done if the user wishes so.
- 908B64B197 3y ago> Unsubstantiated [0] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/04/210421151224.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/04/210421151224.h... [1] https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202106/1225792.shtml https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202106/1225792.shtml
- calsy 3y agoUnlike basic weather metrics like temperature, humidity etc. Air quality measurements are directly impacted by human activity and are extremely contentious. In my hometown, there is a fight between locals and waste operators over excessive burn offs. The validity of air quality readings from the area are being tested in court. In the past, the Vietnamese government removed IQAir from the App Store and Google Play as citizens became increasingly concerned about the air quality in the capital cities. You wont learn much if you label everything you don't understand a 'conspiracy theory'. Air quality is not just another weather measurement.
- counters 3y agoThe problem here is twofold. First, many countries have their own laws and policies regarding air quality exposure. Often times these regulations use metrics about time-average exposure (e.g. the annual average 8-hr maximum ozone concentration) and can't trivially be converted between agencies. It causes very negative user experiences when your air quality summary disagrees with what a regulatory agency is putting out to the public due to a measurement technicality - much easier just to localize the data in the same way you'd localize the rest of the UI. Second, we're stuck with AQI and similar indices because air quality is a multi-faceted problem with different components measured wildly differently. For instance, PM2.5 and PM10 are typically reported in ug/m^3 - but who actually knows what these measurements mean? What's the difference between 15 and 30 ug/m^3? It's very far outside of the experiences that many individuals have, so end users really struggle to interpret these values, even when you translate them into simple "low"/"medium"/"high" categories. Then of course gas-phase pollutants are typically reported in volume concentrations like parts-per-billion or parts-per-million. Aside from the fact that these values are very commonly misinterpreted as much smaller than they actually are, the difference in units adds another bit of complexity into users interpreting what they're seeing. A well-designed air quality index could factor our all these challenges. I definitely h/t Breezometer for their attempts there, even if it is generally poorly received. But it's a very challenging problem no matter how you slice it.
- owl110 3y agoThese are very good points but at least Apple could give the user a choice to report air quality consistently when traveling. At the core, this is not a measurement problem (the underlying data is likely the same) but it is a user experience issue since a user cannot use the color coding as a way to compare different scales across locations.
- counters 3y agoWell, the underlying data might not actually be the same. One country may lump in PM10 into their AQI, so if there is a dust storm or similar event, the AQI could spike. Other countries may only include PM2.5 or not include PM at all, which wouldn't capture the dust storm.
- rkapsoro 3y agoYeah, I've noticed this too. It looks like the air quality models that iOS Weather is using are integrated into a single system, and then that system is asked to render maps in any of the different regions' AQI systems. Which means, as OP has observed, if you open the map from one region, and then navigate the map viewer to another region, you can see how the AQI scoring system from the first region would evaluate the second. Which is rather interesting. Also fwiw I've reckoned that these AQI models are clearly highly algorithmic, extrapolating and synthesizing data where sensors are not available.
- andix 3y agoI didn't know that there is actually any data for this view. With an Austrian iPhone the air quality map is always empty "no data". Also for Germany and the Netherlands.
- teekert 3y agoI live in the Netherlands, I've tried to get this air quality report out of the iOS app, so have others. It just tells me every day the air is shit. I mean when you tap on it, it tells you not to exercise outside for example. It's rarely "good", mostly it is "insufficient", sometimes it's "very bad". Is it really so bad? You don't hear anything about it from other sources... Tapping on, one finds the main pollutant to be ozone, "usually caused by traffic and it can be transported over large distances." Idk what to think of this. Many people seem confused. Are we really in such poor air all the time? Sometimes I bike through the fields in the morning, sniff the fresh humid air that has a coldness in it, I smell grass and flowers... Apple tells me: Insufficient (don't bike to fast!) :(. Maybe they are right, maybe they are forcing us to come to terms with the things we do to our air.
- esafak 3y agoSounds like a bug. I don't recall the Netherlands having bad air; it's pretty green. I wonder how this can be reported?
- Jacobinski 3y agoThe air quality index displayed is based on the current location that you have set to view the weather. If you want to switch to a different scale: add a new saved location, switch to it, and the view the AQI map.
- tekstart 3y agoAs a point of clarification, Apple's AQ data is due to their licensing agreement with BreezoMeter (Israel). http://Breezometer.com http://Breezometer.com As a data broker, they acquire/license the data from a variety of sources and the sell the compiled data to licensees with customer-specific data unit (eg. USA = AQI (EPA std).