10 ms·

The iOS weather-app market

52 points by kingsidharth 16y ago

pwenzel 16y ago
Two weather apps exist on my phone for different purposes. Weather Underground's i.wund.com (webapp) strikes a perfect chord with forecasts such as "today is scheduled to be colder than yesterday". MyCast (native app) is the other one, which provides excellent radar imagery. It was worth buying.
fr0sty 16y ago
>"The main problem with [iOS] weather apps is that there are too many and 99% of them suck." The Android weather-app market is quite similar. Lots of apps and they all suck (so far as I can tell). I'd love to find that gem too, but I don't hold out much hope...
noelchurchill 16y ago
I use Fahrenheit for iOS and like it.
ddlatham 16y ago
These guys really need to bring it to mobile: http://weatherspark.com/#!graphs;ws=31587 http://weatherspark.com/#!graphs;ws=31587
- loire280 16y ago
  This instantly became my favorite weather site. The line graphs are a surprisingly intuitive way to quickly get an idea of where the weather is going in the next few days without hiding the actual numbers. Are these guys on HN?
- ghshephard 16y ago
  Double Plus Yes. I've been using Weather Spark for several months - amazing application. Exactly what the geek in all of us wants from a weather application. And yes, I check in every week or so to see if they've brought it to the iPad.
- Splines 16y ago
  Talk about data telling a story. http://weatherspark.com/#!graphs;ws=31029;t=312594;mspp=900000 http://weatherspark.com/#!graphs;ws=31029;t=312594;mspp=9000...
tolmasky 16y ago
I honestly thought this was meant to be a joke or sarcastic or something. Unfortunately it wasn't, and this really highlights to me a growing feeling I've had since iOS first launched that all of our best talent is working on absolutely the worst and most boring ideas. In other words, being completely wasted. There are SO many calculators, to-do, and weather apps. This wouldn't normally be a problem if it wasn't for the fact that many actual great developers and designers are working on these too. Why would anyone with this kind of talent consider making a weather app? Even if its the best weather app in the universe, its still just the best weather app in the universe. It's as ridiculous as fantasizing about owning the weather channel. This is why we end up with apps that are all form over function, because there's no problem left to solve, just minor quibbles and preferences to satisfy ("oh I wish the to-do app had projects AND sub projects!"). You can view the weather ONLINE. Yes, perhaps there is a magical experience someone may be able to bring to the weather, but that's missing the point. The point is that weather, and to-do, and calendaring, and calculators, are all solved problems, and while they can be done better there exist a whole slew of new apps that no one has imagined possible before on touch and mobile thanks to iPhone and iPad. I say this because I respect these developers and I know they're capable of so much more. Just look at GarageBand. More people should be thinking about the next GarageBand.
- wensing 16y ago
  Weather is not a solved problem. Your vision in the solution space is just limited. We have some extremely talented people working on Stormpulse and the size of the underserved market is staggering. And yes, we have an iPad app launching this summer. :)
  - tolmasky 16y ago
    If you are referring to understanding weather better, or tracking it better, or using it in "big problems" like air traffic control better, then sure. But I think its pretty clear that what's being talked about by the author is the casual consumer space, specifically because he cites the iPhone weather app as one of the better examples of a weather app, and lists "casually checking it every day" as a primary use case. And in the consumer space, I highly doubt that 10 years from now we'll look and say "wow, iPad really changed the way I check the weather in the morning, and thus, the world."
digitalruse 16y ago
I REALLY like "The Weather". It was a rocky launch, but it has really matured and is great. http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/the-weather/id351064928?mt=8 http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/the-weather/id351064928?mt=8
- dbro 16y ago
  They take an interesting approach to UI design: let the user design the layout himself. I'm sure some people really appreciate this. Frustrated by what was available, I created a weather app for Android which did what I want from a weather app: smart alerts about tomorrow's weather. In talking with people about it, I learned there are many different ideas about how the perfect weather app would behave for different people. This is not surprising; weather information is only useful in the context of how it would change your behavior. Since everyone has a different schedule, a consistent and simple interface is not likely to be possible. The name of the app I created is "Anticipates (Weather)". comments are welcome!
  - TillE 16y ago
    Aside: Google's Market search is seriously broken. Link NSFW-ish: https://market.android.com/search?q=Anticipates&so=1&c=apps https://market.android.com/search?q=Anticipates&so=1&#38... Same results on a real phone.
ghaff 16y ago
To tell the truth, I've put my home location on the NOAA .gov website on my home screen and I generally prefer that to any of the apps I've found.
- Turing_Machine 16y ago
  Same here. I have a few sites stashed in that iOS folder (NOAA's Storm Prediction Center, Weather Underground for better storm track displays -- I live in a tornado-prone area) but they're all web pages, not apps per se.
- oddthink 16y ago
  It does seem like something's wrong when http://weather.gov http://weather.gov is the best place to get weather (within the US, of course.) I just wish NOAA had an iPhone app!
  - Turing_Machine 16y ago
    I've been happy enough with just the bookmarked web page, however they do offer lots of data in XML format: http://www.weather.gov/xml/ http://www.weather.gov/xml/
  - igrekel 16y ago
    Why you see this as wrong?
mirkules 16y ago
"it’s just too difficult of a market to succeed in ... it’s extremely competitive, with established TV networks and big-name services taking most of it, and a lot of smaller developers fighting over the rest." These two sentences pretty much explain why there isn't a decent app on the market. TV networks will shove a kitchen sink into an app to distinguish themselves from their competitors (resulting in too much info), small devs are either too inexperienced to create a decent app, or are too experienced to waste their time trying to break through an extremely saturated market.
- wensing 16y ago
  We've been at it since 2006 and are seeing some real breakthroughs now.
wensing 16y ago
Our (Stormpulse) iPad app is coming in June. Our vision is very much in line with yours.
pitdesi 16y ago
In case you didn't click through to the actual article or hadn't seen it, Fahrenheit uses a clever hack to push the actual temperature on the home screen, which I think is awesome: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/fahrenheit-weather-temperature/id426939660?mt=8 http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/fahrenheit-weather-temperatur...
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
joeguilmette 16y ago
Meteogram for iPad is pretty great. I am a bit of a eater nerd though...
mronge 16y ago
I work at the company that makes My-Cast (mentioned in the blog post as one of his favorite wx apps), if you have any suggestions on how we can improve I'd be happy to pass them along. If you are a pilot be sure to check out Pilot My-Cast, which is what I work on. The iPad is incredible for pilots, for far too long they've had to put with complex and arcane UI. We are working on changing that here at Digital Cyclone.
porterhaney 16y ago
This is what I want on my phone. - http://www.wunderground.com/auto/wxmap/ http://www.wunderground.com/auto/wxmap/ Also, with quick links to the NOAA forecaster discussions. The wunderground site also has a pretty slick mobile site, a lot better then most of the apps out there.
sudonim 16y ago
I did some research about how people get weather info: http://ianap.wufoo.com/reports/weather-report/ http://ianap.wufoo.com/reports/weather-report/ And out of that, I've been working on a simple weather app: http://Dopplecast.com http://Dopplecast.com It sends you a direct message via twitter every weekday morning at a time you specify. My main goal is to learn how to build and deploy an app on rails. However I wanted to solve a real need I had too. I found that most people need information about the weather when they are getting dressed to go to work, so I wanted to give them a short sentence to glance at on their phone like this one I got at 8:15 this morning: New York: Partly Cloudy 55 now | 61 low, 78 high. Isolated Thunderstorms today. My initial goal was to get a text message so I can just look at my phone when I need to know, but that was too expensive to run as a service. Then I moved to @messages on twitter, but that was too noisy. Im now doing Direct messages. With an iPhone you get a push alert, and you can get twitter to text you direct messages. Double win. If anyone uses it and wants to give feedback, I'm @alphacolin or @dopplecast on twitter. The site is rough right now, but I solved the weather problem for me, and it's not an app. If it works for you too, let me know!
- spydez 16y ago
  Does it tell you the chance of rain? I have a motorcycle; I only have one weather question in the morning - can I ride today? Rain is pretty much the only thing I care about, and I'm on the Florida coast, so "Isolated thunderstorms" is a "no shit, Sherlock" during spring/summer/fall and entirely useless. I want to know if it's the usual 10-30% chance of mid-afternoon rain, or if it's something more. An alert on my phone ready for me every morning would be ideal. I've found apps in the past that do it, but they always close shop after a few months.
  - wensing 16y ago
    Likely out of your price range but Stormpulse will send you an email or text any time chance of rain exceeds a threshold of your choice. http://stormpulse.com/products http://stormpulse.com/products
  - stevenbedrick 16y ago
    Yes yes yes, please. I live in Oregon, and this time of year[1] pretty much every day is "chance of showers"- but some days that means "off and on, all day long" and other days that means "one or two good downpours, and decent the rest of the day". Trying to guess which it will be at 8:00 AM is a real pain in the neck. I've actually seriously considered trying to train a classifier to make "ride/don't ride" predictions based on the morning hourly forecast. The problem is that I know just enough about both weather and machine learning to know that such a simplistic approach probably wouldn't work very well. And, of course, the relative costs of false positives and false negatives are very different (false negative: I miss a good riding day; false positive: I get soaked and have to deal with slippery pavement).
morais 16y ago
Try Weddar, a new approach to weather reporting - based on crowdsourcing. http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/weddar/id431659526 http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/weddar/id431659526
- pkteison 16y ago
  Why on earth would I want to crowdsource weather prediction? Isn't this one field where we can all agree that an expert opinion backed up by some expensive measurement gear should be a heck of a lot more useful than polling random people? I don't care what my neighbors think the weather will be like this weekend, and I can't imagine why anybody would.
  - ratsbane 16y ago
    Consider mobile devices as a swarm of sensors. If there are enough devices in an area with barometric pressure sensors, perhaps the data they provide could augment existing weather forecasts. As far as I know the Xoom is the only device with a barometer now but perhaps there will be more. If we get access to more sensors we'll figure out things to do with them.
dazzla 16y ago
If no one can agree on what they want maybe the solution is a flexible/customizable app? Let the user choose the depth of data that is displayed.
togasystems 16y ago
Canada's Weather Channel's app Weather Eye is by far the best one I have used. It uses different pages for cities. It has all the information I need in one spot like sun rise and fall. If you are Canadian, I highly recommend checking it out.
- adriand 16y ago
  Agreed - I use that as well. I've tried their iPad App, but I just ended up installing the iPhone version on my iPad instead, because I love its simplicity: a tab for the current weather, a tab for the day's forecast, and a tab for the long-term forecast. That's really all you need.

52 points by kingsidharth 16y ago

Two weather apps exist on my phone for different purposes. Weather Underground's i.wund.com (webapp) strikes a perfect chord with forecasts such as "today is scheduled to be colder than yesterday". MyCast (native app) is the other one, which provides excellent radar imagery. It was worth buying.

fr0sty 16y ago

>"The main problem with [iOS] weather apps is that there are too many and 99% of them suck." The Android weather-app market is quite similar. Lots of apps and they all suck (so far as I can tell). I'd love to find that gem too, but I don't hold out much hope...

noelchurchill 16y ago

I use Fahrenheit for iOS and like it.

ddlatham 16y ago

These guys really need to bring it to mobile: http://weatherspark.com/#!graphs;ws=31587 http://weatherspark.com/#!graphs;ws=31587

loire280 16y ago
This instantly became my favorite weather site. The line graphs are a surprisingly intuitive way to quickly get an idea of where the weather is going in the next few days without hiding the actual numbers. Are these guys on HN?
ghshephard 16y ago
Double Plus Yes. I've been using Weather Spark for several months - amazing application. Exactly what the geek in all of us wants from a weather application. And yes, I check in every week or so to see if they've brought it to the iPad.
Splines 16y ago
Talk about data telling a story. http://weatherspark.com/#!graphs;ws=31029;t=312594;mspp=900000 http://weatherspark.com/#!graphs;ws=31029;t=312594;mspp=9000...

tolmasky 16y ago

I honestly thought this was meant to be a joke or sarcastic or something. Unfortunately it wasn't, and this really highlights to me a growing feeling I've had since iOS first launched that all of our best talent is working on absolutely the worst and most boring ideas. In other words, being completely wasted. There are SO many calculators, to-do, and weather apps. This wouldn't normally be a problem if it wasn't for the fact that many actual great developers and designers are working on these too. Why would anyone with this kind of talent consider making a weather app? Even if its the best weather app in the universe, its still just the best weather app in the universe. It's as ridiculous as fantasizing about owning the weather channel. This is why we end up with apps that are all form over function, because there's no problem left to solve, just minor quibbles and preferences to satisfy ("oh I wish the to-do app had projects AND sub projects!"). You can view the weather ONLINE. Yes, perhaps there is a magical experience someone may be able to bring to the weather, but that's missing the point. The point is that weather, and to-do, and calendaring, and calculators, are all solved problems, and while they can be done better there exist a whole slew of new apps that no one has imagined possible before on touch and mobile thanks to iPhone and iPad. I say this because I respect these developers and I know they're capable of so much more. Just look at GarageBand. More people should be thinking about the next GarageBand.

wensing 16y ago
Weather is not a solved problem. Your vision in the solution space is just limited. We have some extremely talented people working on Stormpulse and the size of the underserved market is staggering. And yes, we have an iPad app launching this summer. :)
- tolmasky 16y ago
  If you are referring to understanding weather better, or tracking it better, or using it in "big problems" like air traffic control better, then sure. But I think its pretty clear that what's being talked about by the author is the casual consumer space, specifically because he cites the iPhone weather app as one of the better examples of a weather app, and lists "casually checking it every day" as a primary use case. And in the consumer space, I highly doubt that 10 years from now we'll look and say "wow, iPad really changed the way I check the weather in the morning, and thus, the world."

digitalruse 16y ago

I REALLY like "The Weather". It was a rocky launch, but it has really matured and is great. http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/the-weather/id351064928?mt=8 http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/the-weather/id351064928?mt=8

dbro 16y ago
They take an interesting approach to UI design: let the user design the layout himself. I'm sure some people really appreciate this. Frustrated by what was available, I created a weather app for Android which did what I want from a weather app: smart alerts about tomorrow's weather. In talking with people about it, I learned there are many different ideas about how the perfect weather app would behave for different people. This is not surprising; weather information is only useful in the context of how it would change your behavior. Since everyone has a different schedule, a consistent and simple interface is not likely to be possible. The name of the app I created is "Anticipates (Weather)". comments are welcome!
- TillE 16y ago
  Aside: Google's Market search is seriously broken. Link NSFW-ish: https://market.android.com/search?q=Anticipates&so=1&c=apps https://market.android.com/search?q=Anticipates&so=1&#38... Same results on a real phone.

ghaff 16y ago

To tell the truth, I've put my home location on the NOAA .gov website on my home screen and I generally prefer that to any of the apps I've found.

Turing_Machine 16y ago
Same here. I have a few sites stashed in that iOS folder (NOAA's Storm Prediction Center, Weather Underground for better storm track displays -- I live in a tornado-prone area) but they're all web pages, not apps per se.
oddthink 16y ago
It does seem like something's wrong when http://weather.gov http://weather.gov is the best place to get weather (within the US, of course.) I just wish NOAA had an iPhone app!
- Turing_Machine 16y ago
  I've been happy enough with just the bookmarked web page, however they do offer lots of data in XML format: http://www.weather.gov/xml/ http://www.weather.gov/xml/
- igrekel 16y ago
  Why you see this as wrong?

mirkules 16y ago

"it’s just too difficult of a market to succeed in ... it’s extremely competitive, with established TV networks and big-name services taking most of it, and a lot of smaller developers fighting over the rest." These two sentences pretty much explain why there isn't a decent app on the market. TV networks will shove a kitchen sink into an app to distinguish themselves from their competitors (resulting in too much info), small devs are either too inexperienced to create a decent app, or are too experienced to waste their time trying to break through an extremely saturated market.

wensing 16y ago
We've been at it since 2006 and are seeing some real breakthroughs now.

wensing 16y ago

Our (Stormpulse) iPad app is coming in June. Our vision is very much in line with yours.

pitdesi 16y ago

In case you didn't click through to the actual article or hadn't seen it, Fahrenheit uses a clever hack to push the actual temperature on the home screen, which I think is awesome: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/fahrenheit-weather-temperature/id426939660?mt=8 http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/fahrenheit-weather-temperatur...

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

joeguilmette 16y ago

Meteogram for iPad is pretty great. I am a bit of a eater nerd though...

mronge 16y ago

I work at the company that makes My-Cast (mentioned in the blog post as one of his favorite wx apps), if you have any suggestions on how we can improve I'd be happy to pass them along. If you are a pilot be sure to check out Pilot My-Cast, which is what I work on. The iPad is incredible for pilots, for far too long they've had to put with complex and arcane UI. We are working on changing that here at Digital Cyclone.

porterhaney 16y ago

This is what I want on my phone. - http://www.wunderground.com/auto/wxmap/ http://www.wunderground.com/auto/wxmap/ Also, with quick links to the NOAA forecaster discussions. The wunderground site also has a pretty slick mobile site, a lot better then most of the apps out there.

sudonim 16y ago

I did some research about how people get weather info: http://ianap.wufoo.com/reports/weather-report/ http://ianap.wufoo.com/reports/weather-report/ And out of that, I've been working on a simple weather app: http://Dopplecast.com http://Dopplecast.com It sends you a direct message via twitter every weekday morning at a time you specify. My main goal is to learn how to build and deploy an app on rails. However I wanted to solve a real need I had too. I found that most people need information about the weather when they are getting dressed to go to work, so I wanted to give them a short sentence to glance at on their phone like this one I got at 8:15 this morning: New York: Partly Cloudy 55 now | 61 low, 78 high. Isolated Thunderstorms today. My initial goal was to get a text message so I can just look at my phone when I need to know, but that was too expensive to run as a service. Then I moved to @messages on twitter, but that was too noisy. Im now doing Direct messages. With an iPhone you get a push alert, and you can get twitter to text you direct messages. Double win. If anyone uses it and wants to give feedback, I'm @alphacolin or @dopplecast on twitter. The site is rough right now, but I solved the weather problem for me, and it's not an app. If it works for you too, let me know!

spydez 16y ago
Does it tell you the chance of rain? I have a motorcycle; I only have one weather question in the morning - can I ride today? Rain is pretty much the only thing I care about, and I'm on the Florida coast, so "Isolated thunderstorms" is a "no shit, Sherlock" during spring/summer/fall and entirely useless. I want to know if it's the usual 10-30% chance of mid-afternoon rain, or if it's something more. An alert on my phone ready for me every morning would be ideal. I've found apps in the past that do it, but they always close shop after a few months.
- wensing 16y ago
  Likely out of your price range but Stormpulse will send you an email or text any time chance of rain exceeds a threshold of your choice. http://stormpulse.com/products http://stormpulse.com/products
- stevenbedrick 16y ago
  Yes yes yes, please. I live in Oregon, and this time of year[1] pretty much every day is "chance of showers"- but some days that means "off and on, all day long" and other days that means "one or two good downpours, and decent the rest of the day". Trying to guess which it will be at 8:00 AM is a real pain in the neck. I've actually seriously considered trying to train a classifier to make "ride/don't ride" predictions based on the morning hourly forecast. The problem is that I know just enough about both weather and machine learning to know that such a simplistic approach probably wouldn't work very well. And, of course, the relative costs of false positives and false negatives are very different (false negative: I miss a good riding day; false positive: I get soaked and have to deal with slippery pavement).

morais 16y ago

Try Weddar, a new approach to weather reporting - based on crowdsourcing. http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/weddar/id431659526 http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/weddar/id431659526

pkteison 16y ago
Why on earth would I want to crowdsource weather prediction? Isn't this one field where we can all agree that an expert opinion backed up by some expensive measurement gear should be a heck of a lot more useful than polling random people? I don't care what my neighbors think the weather will be like this weekend, and I can't imagine why anybody would.
- ratsbane 16y ago
  Consider mobile devices as a swarm of sensors. If there are enough devices in an area with barometric pressure sensors, perhaps the data they provide could augment existing weather forecasts. As far as I know the Xoom is the only device with a barometer now but perhaps there will be more. If we get access to more sensors we'll figure out things to do with them.

dazzla 16y ago

If no one can agree on what they want maybe the solution is a flexible/customizable app? Let the user choose the depth of data that is displayed.

togasystems 16y ago

Canada's Weather Channel's app Weather Eye is by far the best one I have used. It uses different pages for cities. It has all the information I need in one spot like sun rise and fall. If you are Canadian, I highly recommend checking it out.

adriand 16y ago
Agreed - I use that as well. I've tried their iPad App, but I just ended up installing the iPhone version on my iPad instead, because I love its simplicity: a tab for the current weather, a tab for the day's forecast, and a tab for the long-term forecast. That's really all you need.