The 7 best police scanner apps for your phone or tablet

by James · March 13, 2023

Although it is not a must-have app for your Android phone, the police scanner app can come in handy in certain situations. With these apps, you can listen to radio broadcasts from police, fire, and other emergency departments on your phone. Find out about any crime or emergency in your local area. Most people use it for news broadcasts, while some people connect their best wireless earphones to their phones and listen to radio programs from other cities just for fun.

We haven’t seen any major updates or releases in this category. You won’t see any police scanners that win awards for their user interface. However, developers have been constantly updating their existing apps with better compatibility and bug fixes.

Whether you’ve been watching for a long time or just don’t get the rush you get from scrolling through the Citizen app, we’re here to help. Here are our top picks for police scanner apps.

Although police scanners and scanner apps are legal in most of the United States, you need to make sure there are no regulations or laws that prohibit their use or require a permit.

1 Scanner Radio – Police Scanner

Scanner Radio is one of the best police scanner apps on Android. The app covers live streams of over 7,000 fire and police scanners, weather radio stations, ham radio repeaters, marine radios and air traffic. You can check local scanners near you, see the top 50 scanners with the most listeners, check newly added scanners and favorite frequently used scanners.

Scanner Radio has grouped them into appropriate categories such as public safety, aviation, marine, weather and rail. Scanner Radio supports push notifications when the police scanner has more than 2000 listeners, as well as more important alerts for one of your favorite stations, etc. You can also use Scanner Radio widgets and shortcuts for easy access from your home screen.

2 Police Scanner – Live scanner

Police Scanner has one of the largest databases of scanner radio communication streams. Listen to thousands of police, fire and radio scanner feeds worldwide. The user interface of Police Scanner also looks better than the other apps on this list.

You can find a station’s location in your state, check the number of listeners for each station, view news channels near your location, and create a custom favorites list. The developer updates the app frequently to add new stations.

3 Police scanner

Police Scanner is another suitable app on Android. It combines the best police and emergency scanner radio feeds from the web. Contains over 7000 police radio scanners, fire scanners and radio transponders. You will see the maximum number of stations in the US, Canada and Australia.

The app displays the top 25 police scanner radio stations and you can create a list of your favorite stations for easy access. Apart from the police scanner radio stations, you can also check the same for air traffic, rail, marine and weather.

4 Police Scanner – Scanner Radio

This is one of our favorite police scanner apps on this list. You can filter radio scanners by location and quickly find a fire alarm, railway radio, aircraft, emergency, news and police scanner. The app carries thousands of scanner radio feeds from around the world.

Like Scanner Radio, you can get real-time notifications about neighborhood activities, breaking news, traffic and other emergencies. You can also check each station’s popularity feed and mark it as a favorite for quick access. Police Scanner supports sleep time to stop the station at a specific time.

5 Police scanner X

Although the Police Scanner X has an outdated design, it does the job well. The app includes a custom streaming player for a better experience. From the sidebar, you can filter the most popular radio stations and check the active listeners of each station. When you press the play button, Police Scanner X will stream from the top mini-player. We hope to see a better streaming player and design overhaul in future updates.

6 Police Scanner 2.0

Police Scanner 2.0 covers over 7,000 radio stations from police, fire and weather departments. The app displays over 200 top police stations, reports local news, saves your favorite stations and allows you to record stations for later playback.

You can use a sleep timer, access the notification center media player, and check daily updates in the app. Overall, it offers a clean user experience without pop-up ads. Police Scanner 2.0 also supports a dark theme to browse your favorite police radio stations at night.

7 Police scanner radio

Police Scanner Radio offers a smooth application experience with a modern user interface. It supports 10 countries and allows you to browse stations based on popularity. If you’re in the US, you can filter stations by state. You can check your current listeners, press play to start streaming, or bookmark it for later access. Police Scanner Radio lists the top 50 scanners on the popular tab.

Check out the latest events in your area

Most police scanner apps come with ads. You can always purchase the premium version to remove pop-up ads. Apps like Scanner Radio also support widgets on Android. This is one of the useful Android widgets for your home screen.