The 7 Best Emergency Alert Apps of 2024

Location tracking is essential during any emergency, and Life360 is one of the best phone tracking apps out there to get the job done. You can use it to monitor the whereabouts of your friends and family and even get alerts when they leave and arrive at certain locations that you set up.

Constant location monitoring might seem excessive for some people, but you’ll be happy you installed it when an emergency strikes. For example, if you hear about a school emergency or a storm in the town where your daughter lives, anybody in the group can pull up the app to see where everybody else is located.

If there’s a storm brewing where a loved one lives or will be visiting, you can even make a new place alert right there so that you’ll know the second he or she crosses that path.

There’s also messaging built-in to Life360 to text everyone in the private circle, plus a Help Alert feature that calls, texts, and emails the group members when you enable it.

Life360 is free for both Android and iOS users.

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Most disasters are weather related, and AccuWeather is one of the best all-purpose weather apps. It provides timely emergency alerts for all sorts of events, making it a great hurricane tracker app and a general weather app for showing when it will snow, rain, flood, etc.

You can monitor multiple locations at once, see the weather as it stands right now, and view the hourly forecast or extended forecast for the week and month. The radar map is extremely detailed and supports lots of overlays, like for the past or future radar, temperature, dangerous thunderstorms, tropical storms, snowfall, and more.

Staying updated on the most recent weather news is also possible with the AccuWeather app.

Android and iOS users can install AccuWeather.

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Community is important during an emergency. Nextdoor is a social network for your community that can also serve as an emergency broadcast alert app. If someone in your area reports an emergency through the app, you’ll be the first to know about it. 

Once you’ve connected with your neighborhood through the app, you can communicate with people to find shelter, organize the sharing of food and water, get updates on the emergency, etc. Just be sure to see our tips on staying safe while using Nextdoor.

It runs on iPhone, iPad, and Android devices.

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Zello is a walkie-talkie app that makes staying in contact with individuals and groups of people really easy. It’s also helpful for facilitating communication between kids and the elderly who might know how to use a phone properly.

You can create private channels so that only certain people can access the messages, but there are also public channels anybody can join. Just search for something general like weather, or anything specific like a hurricane name or city to see if there are public Zello channels for them.

When you’re actively connected to a Zello channel, you can lock your phone and still hear it when someone talks, which makes this especially helpful during emergencies.

iPhone and Android mobile devices can run Zello.

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The Red Cross First Aid app is one of the best emergency apps for clear health-related instructions. It’s important for situations where you can’t necessarily access a hospital right away. You can use the app to learn how to control bleeding, treat a broken bone, perform CPR, etc.

One part of this app is for learning about these things and others like allergies, asthma attacks, burns, choking, distress, heat strokes, stings and bites, meningitis, and more.

Another section of this emergency app from Red Cross is for learning how to prepare for things like an earthquake, drought, flooding, landslides, tsunamis, volcanoes, and more.

The Emergency section has detailed information and checklists on what to do before, during, and after everything from an allergy issue or head injury to a heart attack, diabetic emergency, and hypothermia.

Quizzes are available to test your knowledge over these things. There’s also a list of hospitals near you with easy access to directions, the facility’s phone number, and their website.

First Aid runs on Android and iOS devices.

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FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, is an agency in the US that’s part of the Department of Homeland Security. The mobile app from FEMA lets you get real time alerts concerning all sorts of disasters.

When you add a new location to get alerts, you have full control over what alert types to monitor: flooding, coastal and lakeshore flooding, severe weather (thunderstorms and tornadoes), tropical weather (hurricanes and typhoons), winter weather (snow, ice, freezing rain), avalanches, fire, extreme temperatures, marine weather, public hazard alerts, and more.

Unlike most similar apps, FEMA also delivers emergency alerts regarding evacuations, civil danger, child abductions, hazardous materials, nuclear power plants, radiological hazards, 911 phone outages, riots, explosions, and more.

FEMA is also a disaster readiness app in that here are emergency safety tips, reminder alerts for testing smoke alarms and updating emergency kits, disaster resources like shelters, and more.

The FEMA disaster alert app is available for Android and iOS devices.

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