AirBear Release Notes v2026.11.01

Last updated on 17 Oct 2026

Download AirBear from the App Store.

A new look

Redesigned for iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Vision Pro. The map fills the screen, with camera controls in the corner and one dock for Traffic, Layers, Sources and More. Controls use Liquid Glass, and the map has dark and light styles that follow your appearance.
Clearer traffic. Aircraft are drawn as airplanes pointing the way they're heading, and APRS stations as dots. Callsign labels stay clear of other traffic and the controls.
Track card. Tap a track to see its altitude, speed, heading, distance and position. Follow keeps it centred as it moves, and a link opens it in FlightAware, ADS-B Exchange or aprs.fi.
Traffic list. Search, filter and sort live and inactive tracks. Choosing one shows it on the map.
Layers. Turn borders, roads, airports, labels, trails, inactive traffic and your location on or off, plus each source.
Sources replaces Connections. Feeds are grouped by receiver, each shows its connection status, and one editor adds a receiver over the network or Bluetooth.
Add Receiver lists the AirBear receivers on your network, so adding one takes a tap.
Mac: a Map menu with keyboard shortcuts. The mouse wheel zooms where you point and the trackpad pans.
Now runs on Apple Vision Pro.

Steady frames draw about 30 times faster (from 38–53 ms to under 2 ms), and countries and states keep their shared borders at every zoom level.
A track heard again after a long silence starts a new trail, not a straight line across the map.
APRS stations stay live for 30 minutes between beacons.
Fixed: islands drawn with another island's shape, roads drawn with a stray closing line, double shading over Czechia and Lesotho, and Clear Map, hover and layer switches not updating until the next pan.

APRS now decodes compressed and Mic-E positions, which most igates and mobile radios send, and accepts comments that aren't ASCII.
Fixed ADS-B, APRS and GPS data being dropped or arriving out of order, and APRS frames being lost when several arrived together.
Over Bluetooth, an error on one feed no longer stalls the others.
Changing a source reconnects only that source.

One command turns a Raspberry Pi into an AirBear receiver for ADS-B, APRS, GPS and Bluetooth, and apt purge removes every trace of it.
It picks an RTL-SDR dongle for each role on its own. airbear status shows how everything is running, and sudo airbear setup changes the settings.
The Bluetooth bridge was rewritten. It keeps accepting connections after 255 streams, keeps running when advertising fails, supports more than one device, and connects only to AirBear's own feeds.
A step-by-step setup guide covers installing, connecting the app, updating and troubleshooting.