PUBLIC BETA

Updates & roadmap

Fire Radar is being developed in public. This page records meaningful changes and fixes so users can see how the service is evolving and where its limitations remain.

What “public beta” means

Fire Radar is live and usable, but it is still being actively improved. Source websites can change without notice, coverage differs by fire and rescue service, and interface or classification behaviour may change as real-world use exposes better ways to present the data. An absent marker never proves that no fire is taking place.

v0.9.4 · 25 August 2026 · Current

Mobile-first map & clearer public presentation

On phones, the live map now appears immediately after a shorter emergency notice, with summary cards and filters moved below the map.
Mobile navigation, map controls and status information were tightened so the incident map gets substantially more of the first screen.
The homepage no longer uses third-party-news coverage as a headline metric; detailed news-discovery status now lives on Sources & coverage.
Search and social metadata were rewritten around the product people are actually looking for: a live fire map and fire incident tracker, rather than a software version number.
Archive wording now distinguishes the seven-day live-map window from Fire Radar's growing searchable historical database.
Added this public beta update and roadmap page, including recent feature and bug-fix history.

v0.9.3 · August 2026

West Sussex, official X ingestion & live-beta fixes

Added West Sussex Fire & Rescue Service as the 18th enabled authority using its official X account as a selective official source.
X retrieval uses the authorised API and incremental since_id polling after a bounded initial catch-up, reducing unnecessary paid reads.
Fixed email sharing so the Fire Radar deep link is included in the message body.
Removed the misleading duplicate “official incident photo” action when public image embedding is disabled.
Related-news checking now backs off as incidents age and normally stops for closed non-major fires rather than scheduling pointless retries.

v0.9.2 · August 2026

Source reliability & hosted public-beta readiness

Improved Essex handling so a genuinely empty recent incident window can be reported as healthy rather than mistaken for parser failure.
Updated Bedfordshire parsing for its current daily-summary layout and improved Merseyside incident location/time handling.
Retained the Suffolk parser improvements introduced during the hosted deployment work.
Strengthened source-health checks so unavailable sources and data-quality failures are distinguished rather than silently appearing as zero incidents.
Continued the PostgreSQL/PostGIS hosted architecture, scheduled ingestion, HTTPS deployment and automated database backups used by the public beta.

SOON COMING

What we are working toward

More fire-service regions

Expand coverage authority by authority where there is a dependable public source, while documenting each source's completeness and quirks.

Stronger live-service monitoring

Improve operator alerts for repeated source failures, worker problems, paid-source failures and other conditions that need attention.

Continued quality & usability work

Use public-beta findings to refine mobile behaviour, status inference, location quality, related-news matching and source transparency.

Roadmap items are intentions rather than fixed release dates. Fire Radar will prioritise reliability and trustworthy source handling over adding coverage quickly.

Found something wrong?

Public beta is useful because real use exposes issues that test data does not. If something looks inaccurate or confusing, compare the Fire Radar incident with its linked official source. The source and coverage pages explain the limitations Fire Radar already knows about.

Review sources & coverage → About the project →