There are few phrases more freighted in the North Bay than “air quality.” Depending on the season, it might mean wildfire smoke, pollen, woodsmoke, exhaust or some atmospheric cocktail that turns one’s plans into an indoor activity.
Santa Rosa couple Jason Curtis and Jennifer Nunn decided that checking the air shouldn’t become a second job.
Their solution is Canairy, a neighborhood-level air quality app built by their two-person software studio, NunnCurtis Labs. Already available for Android, Canairy arrived on the Apple App Store in late July—putting the free app on essentially every species of smartphone just as we enter that charming part of the year when North Bay residents scrutinize the horizon and ask, “Is that fog?”
The name, naturally, riffs on the proverbial canary in the coal mine—only this one spells “air” right into the middle of it.
“We wanted to make an app that helps you understand the air,” Curtis noted during a recent visit to The Drive 95.5 FM. The trick was doing so “not where you have to obsess about it.”
That impulse comes from experience. Curtis and Nunn have lived in Northern California for nearly 30 years, and asthma in the family made air quality a concern even before wildfire smoke became an unofficial fifth season. And like many in Sonoma County, they’ve also had to evacuate due to fires.
“We felt the impact,” Curtis said of the 2017 Tubbs Fire. “It was the morning of my son’s birthday, and we had to pack up and evacuate, and we opened his presents up in some hotel up in Sacramento.”
The fires eventually raised a larger question for the couple.
“The wildfires are really the first thing that made us think, ‘OK, is this the area we wanna retire in?’” Curtis explained. Beyond the flames themselves, he added, years of smoke “made it really hard … to go out and do stuff outside, to do things around what you enjoy.”
Canairy turns the region’s existing air-monitoring infrastructure into something considerably easier to live with.
The app pulls data from PurpleAir’s network of community-operated sensors, EPA AirNow monitors and Google’s pollen forecast.
“There’s PurpleAir sensors all across this county,” Curtis said. Before Canairy, “you’d go to the website, refresh it, look at it. OK, that’s what it is right now.”
Their alternative was to make the information passive.
“We wanted to build something … that can let you relax and say, ‘Hey, this is gonna alert me when the air is bad,’” he noted.
Importantly, “bad” isn’t the same for everyone. Someone with asthma or other respiratory issues may want to know when the AQI moves above 50, while others might tolerate considerably more. Users can tailor their thresholds and monitor multiple places—for example, home, school or an elderly parent’s residence.
Canairy’s free version includes one saved location, push alerts and its pollen forecast. Paid Plus and Pro tiers add more locations, faster updates, text alerts and other features.
The app is also a calling card for NunnCurtis Labs, which represents something of a second act for its founders. Curtis spent years in the wine industry—including stints at DeLoach, Rodney Strong and Coppola—before moving into winery software. Nunn is an electrical engineer with interests in solar and air quality.
Together, they wanted to build technology with a slightly different mandate than the usual attention-extraction machine.
“Instead of just creating an app that consumes your time and doesn’t really add any value to the world,” Curtis said, “we wanted to do something that really hopefully adds value, makes people’s lives a little bit better.”
Canairy is available through the Apple App Store and Google Play. Learn more at canairy-aq.com.
