Storm Guard - Weather Radar

Review by eFreeware

If you have ever been caught out by a shower that arrived twenty minutes earlier than you expected, Storm Guard is built with you in mind. It is a free weather app for Android whose main job is to watch the area around your location and alert you when rain or snow moves in. That is a narrower promise than a full forecast service makes, and it is the reason the app exists.

The appeal is the timing. Rather than asking you to check a forecast and interpret it, Storm Guard pushes a notification the moment precipitation enters a detection area you define. For anyone who works outside, keeps an eye on a garden, or simply wants a heads-up before stepping out, that is a more immediate kind of information than a daily outlook.

It has been on Google Play since early 2016 and sits at a 4.0 average from 183 ratings, with more than 10,000 installs. It is free to download, supported by ads, and offers in-app purchases. The developer's most recent update, in September 2026, was a small bug fix, so this is a mature app rather than a new one.

How the rain and snow alarm works

The core of the app is a proximity alarm. Rain or snow heading your way triggers an alert from Storm Guard. The app refreshes your location when you open it, which is how the detection area stays anchored to where you actually are.

There is a follow location option for when you want the map to keep up with you. Leave it enabled and the map auto-centers and updates your position as you move. Minimize or close the app and your location locks in place instead, so the alarm keeps watching the spot you last set rather than drifting with you.

You are not stuck with the developer's idea of what counts as nearby weather. Detection area size, a minimum intensity threshold, and how often notifications arrive are all adjustable in the settings. If you decide you would rather not be interrupted at all, notifications can be turned off there too.

The coverage is worth knowing before you rely on it. Such alerts cover the continental US and parts of Canada. If you are outside that footprint, the alarm side of the app is not going to do anything for you.

Storm cells, forecasts and map overlays

Beyond the alarm, Storm Guard spends its time analyzing what is on the radar. It scans the detection area and marks the most significant weather with a magenta circle. Tapping that circle opens a cell analysis: average precipitation intensity, maximum intensity, the size of the storm area, and how far it is from your location. That is a compact set of numbers for judging whether a cell is worth paying attention to.

You can also inspect weather anywhere the map shows radar data, not just at your own position, by panning and zooming. A magnifier button at the lower left of the map opens the weather details inspector, which lists every cell in the detection area. The same inspector carries a short-term forecast covering the next three hours, listing weather phenomena that may occur. Pan and zoom and you can pull that outlook for other places on the map.

The map itself supports a set of overlays, each of which can be animated into a time lapse. The list covers weather radar, infrared satellite for cloud cover, 24-hour accumulated precipitation, surface temperatures, and wind speeds and gusts. Looping an overlay is the quickest way to see which direction a system is heading, which pairs naturally with the cell analysis.

For ground-level conditions, Storm Guard reads the observation station nearest the center of the map. This part of the app works globally, which makes it useful well beyond the alert coverage area.

Alerts from the National Weather Service

Active National Weather Service warnings appear too, covering storms from thunder and winter events up to hurricanes. When any alert is detected, a red weather icon appears on the map. Tapping it brings up a list of alerts with their bulletin information.

As with the rest of the map, you are not confined to your own location. Pan and zoom and you can read bulletins for other places relative to the center of the map, which is handy if you have family or property elsewhere and want to see what is heading their way. Alerts are available for US locations, Alaska and Hawaii included.

What the app asks of you

Storm Guard is free to download and carries ads. It also offers in-app purchases. I would treat the free download as the starting point and decide from there.

The bigger consideration is coverage. US locations, Alaska and Hawaii included, are covered by National Weather Service bulletins. Only the station observations are global. If you live outside those areas, you are essentially getting a map viewer with worldwide station data rather than the alerting app the name suggests.

There is also a small habit the app depends on. Opening it refreshes your location, so if you have moved and want the alarm centered on where you are now, you need to open the app rather than assume it has kept up. Follow location handles that automatically while the app is open, but minimizing it locks the position instead.

Getting the most from the settings

The three settings that shape your experience are detection area, minimum intensity threshold and notification frequency, and they work against each other. A large detection area with a low intensity threshold will alert you to almost anything in the neighborhood, including light drizzle you may not care about. A small area with a high threshold stays quiet until something meaningful is close. I would start conservative and widen the area only if you find yourself missing weather you wanted to know about.

Notification frequency is the other lever. If the alarm is firing more often than is useful, slowing it down is a better fix than switching it off entirely, since the point of the app is the warning. And if you are heading out for the day and want the alarm to follow you rather than stay pinned to home, leave the app open with follow location enabled.

The overlays reward a little experimentation too. Looping surface temperatures or wind gusts tells a different story than radar alone, and the accumulated precipitation layer is a quick way to see how much rain has already fallen over an area. For checking conditions somewhere you are not, the global station observations and the map-centered alert bulletins do the work without any setup.

A focused tool for US and Canadian users

Storm Guard does one thing well and does not pretend to be a general-purpose weather app. It watches for precipitation near a location you choose, tells you when it arrives, and gives you the radar and cell data to judge what is coming. The overlay animations, station observations and National Weather Service bulletins round that out without turning it into something else.

If you are outside the alert coverage area, the global station observations and map tools still work, but the alarm at the center of the app will not.

I would install it, set the detection area and threshold to something sensible for where you live, and see whether the warnings arrive early enough to be useful to you.

What's new in version 1.63

v1.63, fix a bug introduced in previous release