I will soon need to replace my primary weather app, Weather Line, as it goes dark in early 2022.
I have Dark Sky which is also going dark, but in about a year.
I have other weather apps on my devices: Weather Strip, Snowflake and The Weather Channel. I don’t like them for a variety of reasons, mostly that the display is too busy or that I can’t see a multiple overviews quickly (see picture below).
There are about a million weather apps out there, but I’m interested in ones that are clean, clearly presenting the pertinent data (see the shared strip view below).
I could try some of those million weather apps, but if people have favorites and could share both why as well as some screenshots, that would be better than relying on reviews and developer-picked screenshots.
And, I’m sure others who are looking would benefit from the discussion.
One of my criteria is a minimum of personal data collected. For me, the two apps I am looking at to replace Dark Sky are Hello Weather and Carrot (set to professional; I don’t need snark from a weather app).
Carrot is very customizable. Hello Weather has a decent layout (though maybe a bit basic), but says that they are very privacy oriented. I believe that Carrot’s privacy policies aren’t bad, either.
Carrot is $20/year in app for a subscription. Hello Weather is $13/year (or $45 for a “lifetime” subscription but after getting burned by Weather Line for a similar option months before it announced their shut down I’m never doing that again.)
In the past, I used and liked the AccuWeather app.
I stopped using it many years ago because it required permission to access all kinds of things they have no legitimate need for (like browsing history), but it appears that they may have changed since then, since the App Store page today shows a much more restricted set of tracking data.
It’s a free app (ad-supported) with an optional subscription to get rid of the ads and unlock some extra “premium” features.
I don’t like Accuweather for their encroachment on the National Weather Service. Stopped using them after that.
I like Windy, a tad different from others, on the web too. A real sense of weather patterns with it, you can zoom in and out, go as local as you wish and drop pins you can save to your account and move between them. Each pin will have it’s own forecast. Quite a different tool as I said, very visual, lots of layers you can explore if that’s your bag, and you can swap between different weather forecasting systems which it gives reviews of, quite interesting.
There’s a Premium version, 18 bucks a year, which gives hourly updates and ‘high quality’ data, whatever that means, presumably more granularity.
I’m currently subscribing to Windy, Snowflake on iOS and The Weather Company on iStat Menus.
Right, I am pretty sure that it was very privacy friendly. But Apple bought Dark Sky a couple of years ago and it is being shut down at the end of 2022.
I suppose it depends on what data / information you want to see and how you like to see it. Along with Apple’s own Weather app, I happen to like the National Weather Service’s regular web page for my area. But even better, I really like their graphical data display, which I ‘bookmarked’ as an icon on my iPhone’s Home screen. It shows 7 layers of data simultaneously. You can find it over at forecast.weather.gov; on the main page for your locale, click on the graphical data picture in the lower right corner of that page to jump to the graphical data display’s own page.
I like CARROT Weather a lot; I’m unaware of any iOS app (weather or otherwise) that offers as many interface customization options. And I enjoy its jokiness at the nicest level of snark.
Look, I can see the Dropbox cloud from here!
I have nothing against Apple’s new Weather app other than its notifications, but I prefer my custom CARROT interface.
Indeed the Weather Underground iOS app was also my favourite, but now it is close to unusable.
I moved to Foreca, which presents a comprehensive set of data, excellent GUI, and it is reliable.
–e.
Besides Apple’s built in I regularly use the excellent DarkSky website which I saved as a bookmark including a pointer to my home location. Can iOS still save bookmarks as icons on the home screen? Would make this basically a “weather app”.
Yes. I still have a few of those (e.g., Amazon on my iPad, because the full web site is better than the app, and because I use smile.amazon.com to have Amazon give a portion of my purchases to a charity, which the iPad version of the Amazon app I believe cannot do still. The iPhone version can.)
But, as previously discussed, the Dark Sky web site is scheduled to go dark [pun intended] in about 13 months.
My wife still uses the Weather Underground app. It’s what she’s used to, and no amount of gentle prodding can get her to try another. I’m hoping that when she updates to iOS 15 she’ll be ok with just the stock weather app (though she uses her iPad Mini more than her iPhone for things like this, and with the iPadOS still not having a stock weather app, maybe it will be iPadOS 16 that will get her to switch.)
