Most flight-tracker apps are built to follow a specific flight — yours, or one you look up. Getting a push notification because some aircraft entered the sky above your house is a different job, and it's the one Squawk is built around.
Following a flight means you already know what you're tracking: a tail number, a flight number, a route. The mainstream trackers — Flightradar24, FlightAware, Plane Finder — and traveler apps like Flighty are excellent at this: live position, delays, gates, arrival estimates.
Watching your sky is the reverse: you don't know what's coming. You want your phone to tap you on the shoulder when something enters a patch of sky you care about — anything, or just military, or just a genuinely rare airframe. That requires the app to run geographic alert zones server-side and push to your lock screen, not just show a map when you open it.
Squawk's alerts see what the community ADS-B receiver network sees. Coverage is excellent over most of North America and Europe, thinner elsewhere; aircraft flying with transponders off — which includes some military — are genuinely invisible to every consumer tracker, ours included. A quiet phone doesn't always mean a quiet sky. Data comes from community feeds with public credit and a no-resale pledge.
Free to download with the live map, military layer, trails, replay, logbook and one alert zone included. Pro — push alerts beyond the first zone, base watching, rare-aircraft pings, weather and airspace layers, full history — is $4.99/month or $34.99/year, and every install starts with a free 7-day trial of everything.
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