Meeting Guide

Review by eFreeware

If you are trying to find an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, whether near your home or somewhere you are traveling, Meeting Guide is the app most likely to be suggested to you. It comes from A.A. World Services itself, it is free, and it carries no advertising and no in-app purchases. That combination is unusual enough to be worth stating plainly, because it shapes what the app is: a directory.

What it gives you is a searchable list of meetings. The developer says more than 150,000 A.A. meetings are currently listed, drawn from over 500 A.A. service entities, and the information is refreshed twice daily. That refresh matters more than it might sound. Meeting schedules change, groups move rooms, and a listing that was accurate last month can send you to an empty hall. A directory that updates itself twice a day is doing the one job that a static printed schedule cannot.

The app has been on Google Play since June 2018 and now sits at a 4.6 average across 5,245 ratings, with more than a million installs. Those numbers tell you it has become a default tool for a lot of people rather than a niche experiment.

Finding a meeting near you

The core of the app is the meeting listing screen, and the main way in is search. You can look for meetings by name or by location, which covers two different situations. If you already know the group you want, typing its name gets you there. If you are in an unfamiliar area, entering a place name gives you the meetings around it.

Location sharing is optional, and the app is explicit about how it works. Grant location access and the app sends your coordinates to find nearby meetings as you browse. If you decline, you can still search by typing a location into the search bar and get meetings near that place instead. Both routes lead to the same kind of result, so the choice is really about convenience rather than access.

The privacy notice also addresses what happens to that information. The app does not retain your geolocation or your search terms, and there is no ad-tracking in the app. Usage information such as your IP address and searches goes to Google Analytics, which the developer says is used to produce aggregate data for improving the app. If you want to change your location setting later, the notice points to your device's own permission controls.

Online meetings and the worldwide list

The newer half of the app is the Online Meetings view, added in version 5.0 and reachable from the main listing screen through the Online tab at the bottom. Upcoming meetings appear in a global list, shown in your device's local time. That timezone handling is the detail that makes a global list usable, since a meeting scheduled in another country would otherwise need mental arithmetic every time.

The online list comes with an expanded set of filters and a keyword search, which is what you need when the pool is the whole world rather than your own city. You can narrow the list down to the kind of meeting you are after and search by keyword to find it faster. For anyone whose schedule does not line up with local meeting times, or who simply prefers to attend from home, this view is the reason to keep the app installed.

Favorites work separately in each view. In-Person and Online each hold their own saved set, reached from the heart button at the top left of a view. Keeping the two sets apart is a small decision that makes sense: the meeting you attend down the street and the one you join from your living room are not interchangeable, and mixing them into one list would only add clutter.

The parts beyond the meeting list

Meeting Guide is not only a schedule. Daily Reflections is included, which gives the app a second, quieter purpose for people who already know where their meetings are and open it for something else. For a reader who likes to start the day with a short piece of reflection, having it in the same place as the meeting directory removes one more thing to remember.

The app also carries contact information tied to local service entities, and the developer describes more accurate locations for reaching that local contact information. In practice this is the bridge between the app and the people behind the listings: if a schedule looks wrong or you need to ask a question about a specific group, the contact details are the route to the entity that maintains it.

The interface has been reworked over time, with a new menu bar and a Contact function arriving in an earlier update alongside improved search. Version 5.1, the most recent change noted, exists to meet new Google Play security requirements by targeting more recent versions of the Android operating system. That is housekeeping rather than a feature, but it is the kind of housekeeping an app with a long life needs.

Getting set up and what you need

There is very little to set up. You install the app, and the meeting list is there. The one decision the app asks you to make is whether to share your location, and you can skip that and search by typed location instead.

The app is free, carries no ads, and offers no in-app purchases, so there is no paywall to work around and nothing to buy once you are inside. It is rated for Everyone and runs on Android, with version 5.1 targeting more recent Android releases. If your device is on an older version of the operating system, that requirement is the thing to check before you rely on it.

The listings themselves depend on the service entities that supply them. The app relays meeting information from area, district and intergroup or central offices, along with international General Service Office websites, and refreshes it twice a day. A local website that is not connected will not appear in the feed, and the developer maintains a support site explaining how A.A. web servants can get their local site connected.

Who gets the most from it

The clearest fit is someone who wants to find an A.A. meeting and does not want to hunt through a web page on a phone screen. The search by name or location, the twice-daily refresh and the absence of ads make it a straightforward tool for that purpose. It is also a natural choice for anyone who travels and needs to locate a meeting in an unfamiliar town without knowing the local service structure.

The second group is people who want online meetings. The Online view, with its worldwide list, local-timezone display, filters and keyword search, is built for someone whose circumstances or preferences keep them away from a physical room. Having separate favorites for online and in-person meetings means both habits can live in the same app without interfering with each other.

It is a directory, and it behaves like one. There is no meeting content inside the app beyond the Daily Reflections feature. If you want a schedule you can trust and a quick way to reach the people who maintain it, that focus is what the app concentrates on.

A dependable directory rather than a hub

Meeting Guide does one job and does it in a way that is hard to argue with. It is free, it is ad-free, it is published by A.A. World Services, and it keeps a very large set of meeting listings current twice a day.

My reservations are about scope rather than quality. The app is a listing service: it points you to meetings and to local contacts, and it includes Daily Reflections. The online view depends on the worldwide list the developer maintains, and the in-person view depends on local service entities feeding their information in. Those are structural facts about how the directory is built, not faults in the app itself.

If you are looking for an A.A. meeting, this is the app I would point you to first. It suits people who want a fast, free, uncluttered way to find a meeting nearby or online, and who value a schedule that updates itself rather than one they have to verify by hand.

What's new in version 5.1.18

Calendar feature update