FlightView: Flight Tracker

Review by eFreeware

If you fly often, or you are the person who drives others to the airport, FlightView is built for the questions that come up before a trip: is the flight on time, which gate, and is the airport itself having a bad day. The app tracks upcoming and in-air flights worldwide and sends status alerts by push notification for the flights you save to My Trips.

It comes from OAG Aviation Worldwide Limited and has been on Android since July 2010, which makes it one of the longer-running names in this category. It is free, it carries ads, and it offers in-app purchases. The average rating sits at 1.5 from just under 12,000 ratings, a figure I will come back to, because it shapes how I would approach installing it.

Tracking a flight from gate to baggage claim

The core of the app is flight status. You look up a flight and see where it is in its journey, including delays and cancellations, along with terminal, gate and baggage claim information. For anyone standing in an arrivals hall waiting on someone, the baggage claim detail is the part that matters most, since it tells you which carousel to watch.

The flight map shows the route a plane is taking with current radar weather layered over it. That combination is more useful than a bare progress bar, because weather along the route is often the reason a flight is running late in the first place. The map is the centerpiece of the interface rather than a small inset.

Alerts are tied to flights stored in My Trips. Save a flight there and status changes arrive as push notifications, so you do not have to keep reopening the app to check. That is the workflow I would expect most regular travelers to settle into: add the flights for a trip once, then let the notifications do the work.

My Trips, notes and syncing between devices

My Trips is where the app organizes travel rather than just answering one-off questions. You can attach notes to a flight or a whole trip, and the examples the developer gives are car rental and hotel reservation numbers. Keeping confirmation details next to the flight they belong to is a small thing that saves digging through email at a counter.

Trips sync between devices and with the FlightView website, so the same list is available on a phone, a tablet and a browser. The app is optimized for both phones and tablets, which matters if you prefer planning a trip on a larger screen and checking it on your phone at the airport.

You can also search flights up to 350 days ahead and save them. That range covers most leisure bookings made well in advance, and it means a trip can be set up in the app long before departure day. Sign-in is through Google.

The airport delay map and what it tells you

The second half of the app is about airports rather than individual planes. A color-coded map covers delays across the US and Canada with a radar weather overlay, so you can see at a glance where the trouble is concentrated. If your itinerary connects through a busy hub, this is the screen that tells you whether to worry.

There is a list of the airports with the biggest departure delays right now, and the developer's own Airport Delay Index covering 180 major airports in the US and Canada. Together these give a picture of system-wide disruption, not just the status of one flight.

The Home page pulls this together: it shows the current status of your home airport alongside your next trip. For someone who flies the same route regularly, that is a sensible default view, since it answers the two questions you are most likely to open the app for.

What you need before installing, and the trade-offs

A few things are worth knowing up front. The app is free but includes ads, and the developer points to a paid version in the store for anyone who would rather not see them. There are also in-app purchases alongside the free download. The delay mapping is focused on the US and Canada, including the 180-airport index and the FAA program information, while flight tracking itself covers flights worldwide.

Trip syncing depends on your Google account. Driving directions to the airport come through Google Maps integration, so you are handing off to another app for that leg of the journey.

The rating is the part I keep coming back to. An average of 1.5 across nearly 12,000 ratings is low for any app, and it is the kind of signal that should make you cautious rather than confident. The most recent update, from January 2026, lists fixes to the flight map and the status bar along with minor improvements, which suggests active maintenance, but it does not by itself explain the score. I would treat the app as a tool to try on a flight you already know the details of, rather than something to rely on for a tight connection the first time out.

Who gets the most from a live flight tracker

The people who will get the most out of this are frequent flyers with repeat routes and anyone who regularly picks people up from airports. The combination of push alerts, baggage claim information and a home-airport view maps neatly onto that routine. Business travelers connecting through large hubs also fit the delay map well, since the US and Canada coverage is exactly where those connections tend to go wrong.

It is also a reasonable fit for travelers who plan far ahead, given the 350-day search window and the ability to keep notes and reservations attached to a trip. If you like having the whole itinerary in one place rather than spread across emails and screenshots, My Trips is the feature to look at.

This is a flight status and airport conditions tool. Travelers looking for fares and reservations will need to handle that elsewhere and use this for the day-of-travel picture.

A useful tracker with a score that gives pause

FlightView covers the ground a flight tracker should: live status for flights worldwide, gate and baggage details, push alerts on saved flights, a map with weather, and a delay picture for US and Canadian airports. The trip syncing and notes make it more than a one-off lookup tool, and the long history since 2010 suggests a product that has been refined over many years.

The caveats are real, though. Ads and in-app purchases sit on top of a free download, and the delay tools are built around the US and Canada. Above all, a 1.5 average from close to 12,000 ratings is not a score I can ignore, and it is the main reason I would suggest trying the app on a flight whose details you already know before depending on it for anything time-critical.

If you fly often enough to want alerts and airport delay information in one place, it is worth installing and judging against your own routes. If you only take a couple of trips a year, the airline's own app or the airport's website may cover the same ground with less friction.

What's new in version 5.0.13

Hey Flightviewers! We have another release for you, continuing the journey of making new Flightview richer and more robust. What We've Released in 5.0.13: * Flight map now updates correctly * Status bar repects current theme * Other minor fixes and improvements We're really keen to keep delivering the features that you want to see and your feedback is driving that. Happy Tracking! The Flightview Crew