As a small boat sailor, I use a number of weather apps, none from Apple.
For general weather I use Weatherbug and MyRadar to check on thunderstorms. The lightning strike map in Weatherbug is particularly useful. And the resolution in MyRadar can give pretty good estimate of thunderstorm activity in the next 6-8 hours.
For wind forecasts and waves, and tides I use the WindAlert paid version and sometimes Windy. WindAlert operates their own network of weather stations on water bodies so you can get very accurate real time reports.
In this summer of wildfires I’ve started using AirNow too.
I use Windy, the Pro option, for the specific details it gives on just about everything. It’s very easy to check varying locations and the pro option covers ten days. I go to islands off the coast here and beyond rain and cloud cover, wind direction, strength as well as wave swells and gaps between waves, all of these factor into decisions as to whether Michael, my boatman, will go out. And it’s very graphical which chimes with me. I like that it comes with a full web interface as well.
I also use Snowflake for day-to-day, hour by hour casual weather checks. But swapping around locations is tiresome with it.
I probably glance at Apple’s Weather app once a day or so, but when I actually care about the weather, I always go to NOAA’s weather.gov web page. It may be clunky, especially on an iPhone, but I’ve found it to be significantly more accurate and detailed than any other site/app, at least for my neighborhood. For convenience, I’ve saved the forecast pages for a couple of my frequently visited locales to a screen on my iPhone.
Apple’s Weather app is all I use. I guess I’m just not “in” to weather, compared to some others here. Of course, I live in southern California. Normally, one glance at the forecast in the morning pretty much does it for the day (or the week). That having been said, we’re currently under the first Tropical Storm Warning ever issued for the left coast of the US. They either missed it, or weren’t issuing such when we had our last one (1939). Anyway, I imagine I’ll be taking more than a cursory glance at the app here in the next couple days.
As many others have said, I was a loyal Dark Sky user and it’s puzzling how Apple’s weather app isn’t as good given the acquisition.
I have a current subscription to Carrot, but I won’t be renewing. It’s super flexible, but I find it confusing and far too complicated to use. And the last thing I want to do is spend fiddling with the crazy number of options it offers.
So, may answer to the poll was Apple Weather. In reality, I also supplement it with the lovely and satisfying Weather Strip.
I use weather several times daily and agree with Simon:
I don’t know why Apple can’t seem to get this right, but the often absent or slow-loading map sections or missing radar precipitation data from one segment of the map are a PITA.
I don’t use Apple’s Weather app. I dont’ find it very useful for the reasons already mentioned in the comments.
The only dedicated weather app I use is RadarScope on both my iPhone/iPad and my Macs.
For all other weather information, I use the NOAA/National Weather Service and several 3rd party web sites that present the NOAA data in formats to my liking. Here is a link to my own collection of weather sites that I use regularly.
Note: I am a retired Meteorologist/Atmospheric Scientist that worked for almost four decades in both weather research and weather forecasting so my needs are probably not typical of most users.
I almost never look at Apple’s Weather app. I use the New Zealand MetService app, and occasionally AccuWeather (which I find more detailed, but less accurate).
I’m also a big CARROT fan. One of the great things about CARROT is that you can choose different weather sources (with the Premium and Ultra subscription plans). With all of the extreme weather and air quality issues we’ve had over the past few months, I find the app invaluable.
The Weather.app gives slightly different results on my iPhone versus either of my iPads, MBA. I have found he iPhone data to be much less accurate. Therefore, I do not use it.
I use Weather.app on my iPad & MBA and myRadar.app when Weather.app open has difficulty displaying current radar.
I use Weatherbug as an alternative at the moment, but often switch around among the free apps. Weather Channel’s app just got to get way to intrusive with the ads, it was my goto weather app for a long time, but I dropped it last year.
I always turn to Apple’s Weather first–I like the interface, and no ads. Also, the alerts help, even if they aren’t always accurate (expect rain in 15 minutes–and 15 minutes later, it’s sunny and not a cloud in the sky…), but I also will open Yahoo Weather, because it sometimes seems more accurate, but that isn’t a daily thing, unless the weather is changeable or I don’t trust what I’m seeing on Apple Weather. I deliver mail, so I use weather a lot. :-)
For current and short term (an hour or so in the future) forecasts, I use Weather on my iPhone. Only slightly more often than I use a link to the US Weather Service’s 5-day point for where I live on my Mac.
I would like to vote for BOTH Apple’s Weather app and a third party app (WeatherNetwork).
I like Apple’s app for a quick glance at the forecast and for the fact that it tracks the actual amount of precipitation today.
But the Weather Network app’s Radar view is far superior. Plus it has a summary for Afternoon, Evening, Night and Morning to come. That’s a better level of detail than checking each of the next 24 hours.
Just to add to my answer above, when it comes to third party weather apps, I won’t use an app that has a bad tracking/privacy policy, particularly because for a weather app, allowing location access is important for an accurate forecast and for notifications of severe weather events. The right to follow my location for me requires a strict policy of not capturing that data and linking it to me. So, the wundergrounds and weather bugs and weather channels as apps on a device that is always on and always with me - they are just not for me.