Settle the real question first: is there anything left to hear where you live? US police forces have been moving onto encrypted talkgroups for years, and encryption is absolute. The apps mislead in a second way too: they are not radios. They play volunteer run internet feeds, so they need data and run behind. Aviation, marine and rail are where the hobby still reliably works.
An encrypted talkgroup is silent to everyone outside the agency using it. No app gets around that, and neither does a receiver at any price. Once a department encrypts, its feeds vanish from the directories.
There is no federal mandate and no single switching date, only a long run of local decisions pushed along by California Department of Justice bulletin 20-09-CJIS of 12 October 2020. It required agencies to protect criminal justice and personal data carried on radio, by encryption or by a policy limiting what goes out over the air, and many chose encryption. Denver, Baltimore, New York City and the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department are now fully or partly closed, and smaller counties follow every month.
Coverage is patchy and shrinking rather than gone: fire and EMS dispatch often stays open when police traffic closes, and sheriff and state agencies vary county by county. Search your own county in an app's directory before you judge the app. An empty result describes your local agencies, not the software.
An Android phone has no wideband radio receiver. What a scanner app plays is an internet stream: a volunteer runs a real scanner, feeds the audio into a network such as Broadcastify, and the app fetches it. Everything awkward about these apps follows from that.
Broadcastify's own support pages say it no longer maintains a phone store app, pointing listeners to third party apps and its mobile site. Its old Play listing returned nothing in August 2026.
In the United Kingdom the emergency services run encrypted digital radio, so there is nothing to relay and no feed to subscribe to. Germany's BOS network is the same, most of the EU runs encrypted TETRA or TETRAPOL, and Canada and Australia are mixed, their large metropolitan systems mostly closed. Even where listening would be lawful, an encrypted network produces nothing to hear. Outside the US, treat these apps as aviation, marine, rail, weather and amateur radio players that carry some American public safety audio.
This is not clever software: you are choosing a directory browser wrapped around a stream player, so judge on directory size, ad load and update date.
One to skip: Scanner 911 by XYWARE still ranks well at 4.6, but its last Play update is dated June 2021.
Air traffic control is analogue AM on VHF almost everywhere and unencrypted by design, so those feeds are stable in a way police feeds are not. Scanner Radio's aviation genre is the simplest way in. LiveATC also publishes its own paid client, LiveATC for Android, at 3.99 dollars, rated 3.8 from about 5,020 reviews, updated December 2025.
A map next to the audio helps. Flightradar24 Flight Tracker by Flightradar24 AB, 4.5 from around 652,000 reviews, updated July 2026, names the callsign you are hearing, with ads and in-app purchases.
Marine VHF is open too and coastal feeds are common; MarineTraffic Ship Tracking fills the same map role for shipping on a weak 2.9 rating from about 128,000 reviews. North American railroad road channels are still analogue AM and VHF, so whether you can hear them depends on a volunteer running a feed near the line. Europe's GSM-R is cellular, so there is nothing there for a scanner.
In the United States, receiving public safety transmissions is generally lawful, but several states restrict scanners. Florida goes furthest: statute 843.16 makes it a first degree misdemeanour to install or transport radio equipment tuned to police or fire rescue frequencies in a motor vehicle at all, with narrow exemptions for emergency and sheriff approved crime watch vehicles, licensed amateur operators, news organisations and alarm contractors. No weapon, drug or crime in progress is needed. A separate Florida statute, 934.215, covers using a two way communications device to further a felony. Indiana, Kentucky, Minnesota, New Jersey and New York have their own in vehicle or in commission of a crime provisions.
In the UK, the Wireless Telegraphy Act 2006 makes it an offence to use radio apparatus to obtain the contents of a message you are not authorised to receive, and a separate offence to pass on what you hear. German law takes the same position. Both are aimed at radio receivers rather than internet stream players, and in both countries the traffic is encrypted anyway. Check your own jurisdiction rather than assuming the American one travels.
Two things this article will not help with: defeating encryption, and using a scanner to evade the police, which is what those statutes punish.
Where an app sells a paid tier, read what it covers before paying: the listings above price theirs as in-app purchases rather than as access to the feeds.
If the directory is empty for your area, the next step is hardware. An RTL-SDR style USB dongle and an OTG cable turn the phone into a receiver. SDR Touch by Signalware Ltd is the usual driver app: its listing names RTL-SDR, NeSDR, SDRplay and HackRF support and 20 MHz to 2.2 GHz coverage depending on the dongle, on a 2.9 rating from about 5,100 reviews. RF Analyzer is the spectrum analyser alternative, rated 3.8.
Both demodulate analogue modes, so trunked digital systems need other software and encrypted traffic stays unreadable. A dongle solves a coverage gap, never an encryption one. More gear like this sits in tools and utilities, and for severe weather a weather app will warn you faster than any feed.
In parts of the United States, yes, in a shrinking number of them. An encrypted system does not fade, its feed simply disappears, so search your own county in an app directory first. Fire and EMS dispatch frequently stays open where police traffic has closed, and a feed can go quiet when its volunteer is offline.
They stream. An Android phone has no wideband radio receiver, so it plays audio a volunteer relays from a real scanner into a network such as Broadcastify. You need Wi-Fi or mobile data, and what you hear arrives with the delay of the relay chain rather than live.
It depends where you are. In the United States receiving public safety transmissions is generally lawful, but Florida statute 843.16 bans transporting radio equipment tuned to police or fire frequencies in a motor vehicle at all, with narrow exemptions; Indiana, Kentucky, Minnesota, New Jersey and New York have their own in vehicle or in commission of a crime rules. UK and German law targets radio receivers rather than stream players.
No. Encryption is not a coverage problem that better hardware solves. An RTL-SDR dongle with an app such as SDR Touch reaches frequencies no streaming app carries, but it demodulates only analogue modes: encrypted traffic stays unreadable and trunked digital systems need separate software.