SonderEye

The planet's live traffic on a 3D globe, on your phone and on Windows.
Free, open source, no account, no backend.

Download: the APK for Android 8.0 or newer, or the setup / portable app for Windows 10 and 11

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SonderEye puts public signals on one native globe: earthquakes, aircraft, satellites, ships, fires, storms and the weather, drawn on satellite imagery you can zoom from the whole Earth down to your street. It is a native app for Android and Windows, built from scratch, not a web page in a wrapper.

What it shows

On the globe

• Earthquakes (USGS), sized by magnitude and coloured by depth.
• Aircraft (adsb.lol), gliding between updates, with 30-minute trails and a follow mode.
• Satellites (CelesTrak), positions computed on the phone every second, with the orbit of the one you pick and its next passes over you. GPS and geostationary orbits included.
• Ships (AISStream), fire hotspots (NASA FIRMS) and public webcams (Windy), each with your own free key.
• Natural events (NASA EONET): wildfires, volcanoes, storms, ice.
• Conflicts: places the world's news reports fighting in (GDELT), up to a day back, with the stories, and an optional short account of what happened, written by Gemini.
• Rain radar (RainViewer), optionally looping the past hour.
• Surveillance cameras and licence-plate readers mapped in OpenStreetMap.
• Bus lines and stops mapped in OpenStreetMap, each line in its own colour; pick one to see its whole route, or ride it: the map follows you and says the next stop and how many are left.
• Live buses wherever the operator publishes GTFS Realtime (found through Transitland, with your own free key).
• Day and night, with city lights on the dark side.

Around it

• Today: the weather where you are and the day's news from the sources you choose, with an optional summary written by Gemini, made once a day.
• Sky view: point the phone at the sky to see the satellites, aircraft, Sun and Moon above you, labelled.
• ISS pass alerts: a notification before each pass you can actually see.
• Search for places, flights by callsign, and satellites by name.
• A list of every item in each layer, nearest first, one tap from flying to it; any layer can be hidden from the map from its list.

The globe

• Native OpenGL ES 3.0, camera-relative rendering: no float jitter from 40,000 km down to 120 m.
• Esri satellite imagery, streets, or yesterday's whole Earth from NASA, with roads and place names on top; close in, the roads are drawn by the app from OpenStreetMap data, sharp at any zoom.
• The whole Earth at country scale ships inside the app (NASA Blue Marble), so the globe appears at once, even offline.
• Tiles load centre first, parents before children, and are kept on the phone (up to 500 MB).
• Markers lie on the curved surface; satellites face you from orbit.
• A radar scope over the screen centre: bearings, range rings at real ground distances, and a sweep.

Data sources

Layer	Source	Key
Earthquakes	USGS summary feeds	None
Flights	adsb.lol, community-fed ADS-B	None
Satellites	CelesTrak orbital elements, cached 2 h as they ask	None
Natural events	NASA EONET	None
Built-in globe	NASA Blue Marble Next Generation via GIBS, public domain, bundled by CI	None
Streets, roads, labels	Esri World Street Map and reference layers	None
Today from space	NASA GIBS, VIIRS NOAA-20 true colour	None
Rain radar	RainViewer, personal use, zoom 7 at most	None
Weather	Open-Meteo	None
Night lights	NASA GIBS, VIIRS City Lights 2012	None
Place search	Nominatim, OpenStreetMap	None
Ships	AISStream live AIS over WebSocket	Free, GitHub sign-in
Webcams	Windy Webcams API	Free
Fire hotspots	NASA FIRMS, VIIRS NOAA-20, last 24 h	Free, e-mail
News	Publisher RSS/Atom feeds (12 built in, or your own)	None
Written brief	Google Gemini API, optional	Free tier
Surveillance cameras	OpenStreetMap via the Overpass API	None
Conflicts	GDELT 15-minute event files: assaults, clashes, mass violence, up to 24 h	None
Street-level roads	OpenFreeMap vector tiles (OpenMapTiles, from OpenStreetMap)	None
Bus lines and stops	OpenStreetMap via the Overpass API	None
Live buses	Operators' GTFS Realtime feeds, found and relayed by Transitland	Free
Imagery	Esri World Imagery (Esri, Maxar, Earthstar Geographics)	None

Permissions: internet; location only for "Where I am"; camera only for the sky view; notifications only for pass alerts.

Installing

1. Download SonderEye-<version>.apk from Releases.
2. Open it on the phone. Android asks once to allow installs from your browser or file manager.
3. Everything without a key works straight away. For ships, webcams, fire hotspots, live buses and the written summaries, get the free keys from the menu's API keys section (each has a Get-a-key button) and paste them in.

The APK is signed with the project's own key, so later releases install over it and keep your settings.

Windows

The same app as a native Windows program (desktop/), built with Compose for Desktop. It runs the Android app's own data and maths code (core/, and the downloads in data/), compiled straight from app/src/main/java, so both behave the same.

• Download: SonderEye-<version>-Setup.exe installs it (Start menu and desktop shortcut, no administrator rights needed); SonderEye-<version>-Portable.zip is a folder with SonderEye.exe that runs from anywhere. Both include their own Java runtime.
• Touchpad: slide two fingers to move the map, pinch to zoom.
• Keyboard: W A S D (or the arrows) move the map, E picks the point nearest the middle (E again for the next), Enter opens it. Hold Ctrl to zoom in, Space to zoom out.
• Mouse: drag to move, wheel to zoom at the pointer, right-drag to turn, click to pick, double-click to zoom in, right-click (or hold still a second) for the weather there and to set it as your place. Escape closes the panel or card on top. It opens full screen; F11 switches to a normal window and back (Alt+F4 closes it).
• Your place: a PC has no GPS, so it comes from your internet connection (to a few km) unless you set it yourself; your own place always wins.
• ISS pass alerts are Windows notifications, while the app is open.
• Left out on Windows: the sky view (it needs a phone's camera and motion sensors) and riding a bus (it needs a position that moves with you).
• The installer is not code-signed: Windows SmartScreen asks once ("More info", then "Run anyway").

Privacy

No account, no server of ours, no analytics. The app asks each source directly for what it shows; your keys and settings stay on the phone. Your position is used only on the phone, for "Where I am", the weather, pass alerts and bus rides, and is sent to no one except as the point of a weather or search request.

Building

JDK 17 and Gradle 8.9.

gradle assembleDebug
gradle testDebugUnitTest

Windows: gradle -p desktop :app:run to start it, :app:packageExe for the installer (JDK 17; WiX for the installer, as on GitHub's Windows machines).

CI downloads the bundled Blue Marble tiles (tools/fetch_bluemarble.py, about 5,500 tiles, cached between runs) before building; a local build without them still works, just without the built-in globe. Pushes to test/** build a signed test APK and publish it as a pre-release named test-<branch>. Failed builds attach their output to the pre-release ci-failure.

More detail in docs/ARCHITECTURE.md.

Licence

GPL-3.0-only. See LICENSE.

Bundled typeface: Roboto Condensed, SIL Open Font License 1.1 (licenses/RobotoCondensed-OFL.txt). The S in the logo is drawn from Audiowide, SIL Open Font License 1.1 (licenses/Audiowide-OFL.txt).