5 best police scanner apps for Android (2024)

FAQs

What's the best free police scanner app for Android? ›

Scanner Radio is one of the best police scanner apps on Android and iOS. The app covers live audio feeds from more than 7,000 fire department and police scanners, weather radio stations, ham radio repeaters, marine radios, and air traffic.

Download a police scanner app for your mobile device.

There are many different police scanner apps available to casual listeners, all of which will provide access to channels in your immediate vicinity and beyond. While some police scanner apps are sold for a small price (usually $3-5), many of the best ones are free.

Many large cities in the US and UK have encrypted all police radio conversations, making it impossible to listen to local police scanners. If you live in one of these areas, you should know that other emergency radio channels, like fire and EMS, are usually not encrypted, so you may listen in on local issues.

Scanner Radio:

Stay up-to-date with the latest news and emergency broadcasts using this popular police scanner app. With Scanner Radio, you can tune in to real-time audio feeds from police departments, fire departments, and EMS agencies, keeping you informed about incidents and events happening in your area.

Scanner Radio is the #1 police scanner and alerts you of breaking news so you can listen to the action live with millions of others.

Can scanners be modified to listen to it? By federal law monitoring private phone conversations is prohibited. No scanners made in the last 10 years have been capable of monitoring cell phones or are capable of being modified to do so.

Introducing the Firefighter Radio App - your one-stop solution for staying connected to real-time firefighting activities in your community. This app opens a new window into the world of our brave first responders, letting you listen in on the radio communications of firefighters from various local departments.

The most popular is the 144-MHz (2-meter) band. That's where you'll find a lot of ham radio operators as well as local public safety calls. If you want to hear the civilian aircraft frequencies, you'll want to look for a radio that has the 118 to 136 MHz air band.

To turn your smartphone into a radio scanner, you need an app and either a mobile data plan or access to a Wi-Fi signal. Since your phone can't receive over-the-air (OTA) transmissions from sources like police radios, you'll rely on radio buffs to receive and then stream transmissions.

How do police scanner apps work? ›

You're probably not hearing everything, and you're probably not hearing it in real time. The web-based scanner apps often blend multiple radio frequencies together so there is more traffic to listen to. Most public safety communications are trunked, where traffic is carried over multiple radio channels.

American cities are encrypting their emergency radio communications over concerns about safety and privacy.

Police scanners allow you to pick up radio frequencies & listen to communication on those frequencies much like an FM radio allows you to listen to different channels by changing the dial from 93.7FM to 102.5FM. By changing the channel, your radio is picking up one signal & blocking out another.

Mobile Scanner is a free-to-download and all-in-one scanner app. Scan any documents, paper notes, photos, receipts, and books into clear PDFs and pictures. Convert images into text with OCR technology and export searchable PDF files.

With the Adobe Scan app, easily capture and convert documents, forms, business cards, and whiteboards into high-quality PDFs. And with different capture modes along with automatic boundary detection, you can get the best scans every time.

A simple but versatile option for Android users, the QR Code Reader by Scan Mobile is available for Android in the Google Play Store. It has a 4.4 rating and is free to download. The app is positioned as a toolkit for any scanning needs and can be used to scan both QR Codes and traditional Barcodes.