Ward is an app for emergency situations and preparedness.
It all started when my friend Melcher -who is an ex-military of Dutch army- came up with the idea of an app that have all the shelters, bunkers and safe places for the time of war and emergency.
He shared the idea with me, and some weeks later we decided to build it.
230,000+ locations
We started with the Netherlands for data gathering and entering. And after having ~2500 locations in the database, we launched the app.
Later we got to the top #1 Navigation app, and top 5 apps in the most downloaded apps in the whole NL App Store for many days.
After almost a year and half, now it has 230,000+ mapped locations covering fallout shelters, bunkers, tornado and storm shelters, and emergency / evacuation shelters worldwide. It’s strongest where official civil-protection feeds are open. The site is at wardalerts.com.
Android App
We’ve been asked by hundreds of people on our social media and support email about an Android app.
I didn’t have experience developing for Android. But with AI coding getting better every day, I thought it’s possible. So, I started and surprisingly only two weeks later we had a full functioning Android app.
As we expected, from the moment we published it, thousands of people installed it. And the best thing for me it was to get way more confidence with Android app building.
Ward is free on iOS and Android: iPhone, Apple Watch, and Android, with the product UI in 18 languages.
Right now I’m working on a new Android release that brings over the alerts experience (world emergency alerts, the map, and watching cities you care about), plus catching up on the newer preparedness features iOS already has. The Play build is still catching up; alerts parity is the next big ship.
Library
We shipped a Library tab with two pieces people kept asking for.
Emergency kit is a full checklist for preparedness: what you need at home, for the household, with expiration tracking so a green/red status tells you if supplies are still good (including water storage).
Hazard Guides are documents and materials from international and local agencies, organized per emergency type. Useful when you want to understand a hazard before it shows up on the map.
Version 3.0: World Emergency Alerts
In July 2026 we released a major iOS update: Ward 3.0.
Finding shelters was never enough on its own. People also need to know when something is happening (severe weather, tornadoes, earthquakes, floods, wildfires, hurricanes, public safety incidents), wherever they are, and wherever family lives.
So now Ward notifies you for emergency alerts in real time. There’s a world emergency alerts map with alerts issued by official organizations across 140+ countries and 13 hazard categories, and a dashboard where you see alerts, bunkers, and shelters in your area. You can tune severity, radius, and hazard types, use quiet hours that severe and extreme alerts still bypass, and follow developing situations with Live Activities on the Lock Screen and Dynamic Island.
Version 3.1: Alerts for any city
In early August 2026 we shipped 3.1. The big ask after 3.0 was simple: don’t only watch here. Watch the places that matter.
You can now choose to receive instant emergency alert notifications for any city worldwide. Earthquakes, local emergencies, the alerts that used to only land if you happened to be standing in that city. Now they can follow the cities you pin. Each city on the dashboard gets weather, a short forecast, active alerts, and shelters side by side.
Version 3.5: Netherlands emergency activity
In mid-August 2026 we shipped 3.5 on iOS: design and performance work across the app, plus a focused upgrade for people in the Netherlands (or traveling there).
You can see emergency activities in the Netherlands in real time inside Ward, and get notified about nearby activity when you opt in. Same product job as the world alerts layer, knowing when something is happening, but tuned to the Dutch feed that mattered from day one.
Version 3.6: Environment and food safety on the map
In mid-September 2026 we shipped 3.6 on iOS. The map got two new layers that sit next to the alerts you already watch.
Environment brings tornadoes, earthquakes, and volcanic activity onto the map. Where camera feeds exist, you can watch volcanoes live. If you’ve turned on notifications for your places, you also get alerts when tornadoes threaten those areas.
Food shows official food recalls and safety warnings for your country (and saved cities) as clear nationwide pins, so a recall is something you can spot on the map, not only a headline you might miss.
Around that: sharper hazard icons, clearer pins, and a cleaner filter experience so Environment and Food sit alongside the existing alert layers without turning the map into noise.
Late September follow-ups on the 3.6 line (through 3.6.3) expanded emergency activity coverage further and cleaned up a handful of map and notification edge cases. Same layers, more ground covered.
Ward for Business
The same official alert network that powers the app is also available as an API.
Ward for Business is a REST feed of normalized, geocoded emergency alerts: CAP sources from national weather and civil protection agencies, one JSON schema, translations included. Query a point or area and get active warnings with severity, category, instructions, and geometry. Docs live at docs.wardalerts.com; there’s a free trial and paid plans for products that need this layer without building a worldwide warning ingest themselves.
Travel apps, logistics, insurance, duty-of-care tools, newsrooms: anyone who needs “is there an official warning here right now?” without maintaining per-country parsers.
Next Steps
The immediate focus is shipping that Android alerts release and catching Play up to the newer iOS map layers (Environment, Food, city watches). Ward for Business is already live for teams who want the alert feed; on the consumer side I’m also working on a proactive system to integrate with the app, which I will write about in the future. More to come soon.
I wrote a short note on the 3.1 city alerts work in Ward 3.1: alerts for any city you care about.