The iOS weather-app market | Hacker News Reader

The iOS weather-app market

marco.org

52 pointskingsidharth50 comments

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.

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. :)

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."

I know you're being sarcastic but checking the weather the weather app on the my iPhone (and previously, on my Android phones) is one of my primary use cases of the phone, however sad this may be. It's the first thing to do in the morning, even before I leave the bed. I check the weather on my phone. The weather app must be good enough that I'll have a good understanding of the weather conditions of that day even when I'm still half-asleep. The lack of a good weather app on a platform is a complete dealbreaker for me and I'd be gladly paying for a really good one. And I don't think I'm alone with that.

> It's the first thing to do in the morning, even before I leave the bed.

Unless you're a landscaper or something, I have to say this sounds a little on the crazy side.

Clearly you never lived in England.

Agreed in that I wouldn't take his request as a call to arms for making something that only applies in low-stakes situations.

But his point about making weather accessible to consumer levels of expertise is spot on.

Disagree that it's a waste. Yesterday's bookstore is today's cloud computing infrastructure. Today's weather app may be tomorrow's <whatever>. Getting people coding, shipping and excited about what they're doing will yield positive results later. I'm also a believer in nurturing genius. Ideas and innovation start from a slow simmer while working on seemingly mundane problems.

First of all, I don't think that any of these are solved problems besides maybe calculator.

But even granting that they are, having the vision to find an ambitious and original project is part of what it means to be "capable of so much more," and is not a common skill.

No offense to app devs, but I don't think they represent "the best and the brightest". Those types are working at Google on voice recognition, self-driving cars. Or they're working on Cisco working on scaling the internet. No offense to Marco, who's probably a better programmer than I, but he always came across to me as a really good product and design guy. Someone who has a knack for UX but can also program. I think working on these "problems" is a good place for him.

What gets me is when Facebook starts hiring the best engineers away from Google and Microsoft to go work on Deals and Messages. That Lars Rasmussen built Maps (one of Google's 2 killer apps) and the awe-inspiring, but before it's time Wave, and now is doing who knows what trivial (though I'm sure technically hard) thing at Facebook is a real shame.

There's different kinds of best. I think its fair to say that a lot these people are the best when it comes to the scoped problem of consumer apps (and similarly, the Google guys are terrible at this, and they're both important fronts -- I don't think Google could have pulled of the original Mac which is just as important as many of the problems they work on). And as such, I don't feel that because you are "just" a consumer app guy its fair to essentially say stick to these trivialities.

Imagine the design sense of some of these guys applied to medical or scientific apps. It would be incredible. I see my father use the most horrific and inefficient web interfaces in the universe to find papers or do gene cutting. Now there's a space waiting to be disrupted with usability.

I disagree that this is solved. Although Marco talks mostly about UX (being a UX guy), there is a lot to do on the backend, and I don't mean in weather prediction. For example, most of the data comes from a few sources (Bing even lists all of them, gross!). Why aren't these apps "grading" the forecasts after the fact and using that data to weigh which gets shown to the user? I can go on, there's a lot more than just UX needing to be worked on.

One thing I think is really interesting is that in the App Store categories Weather is a top level category, right next to Music, News, Education and so on.

I personally wonder if not the only thing that drives the weather-app market on iOS is Apple listing Weather as its own category.

Disclaimer: I'm the creator of Degrees, Weather for your Mac http://itunes.apple.com/app/degrees/id430173763?mt=12

I agree. Here's a crazy idea: App creators are limiting themselves. They don't think in the big picture. They play it save. All because previous App denials have made it terribly expensive to create something and then be shut down at the last step.

Where is the next Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Photoshop, Hypercard, Eclipse, XCode, Visual Studio, browser extensible with plugins like Firefox, vmware, Bittorrent, Protools, Cubase, Live, Avid, FCP, Maya, Blender, Max, Aftereffects or Dreamweaver?

Well, quite a few of them have been actively banned by Apple.

I haven't seen any really complex new Apps for the iPad, where somebody invested heavily. Games don't count, they are very rarely killed by Apple. Ports don't count neither, there is less investment there.

Where are the big investments?

I've seen 5 so far: Pages, Numbers, Keynote, Garageband, and TheDaily. 4 from Apple and 1 from Murdoch, created with the personal guarantee by Murdoch's buddy Jobs that it will reach customers.

Could somebody comment? Are there app creators that indeed play it save? Are there others that are investing big time and have just not reached their 1.0 yet?

http://www.photographybay.com/2011/03/30/photoshop-for-ipad-...

I expect this to be based on Adobe Air, though. That makes it a multi-platform investment. Also, I am not sure this is 'big time' for Adobe.

Well, a few people are working on Powerpoint replacements.

But the problem with the complex set you show is that those kinds of applications can take millions of dollars to get to a point where they can compete.

I have a great idea of how to take Excel down, for example. However, when I tallied up the hours it would take just to get to an MVP, it was far out of my range, and far out of three people unless we locked ourselves in a room for a year. To get to an MVP. To compete with something that many businesses get with Word.

You can't beat Excel from the bottom up, because LibreOffice already has that world. The key in that world, I believe, is to attack at the top. Big excel spreadsheets are a nightmare to handle. There's no good way to version control. VBA is easy to turn into spaghetti code. It's expensive to develop ways to see your business intelligence data, whether by packages such as Xcelcius or custom solutions taking a developer's time.

It's the wrong arena to compete on price, but you need a large subset of Excel's features to get to the point where you can tackle that fish.

Or, you can try to make a hit in the app world to prove you have the chops so you can get investment for your bigger ideas.

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

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?

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.

Talk about data telling a story.

http://weatherspark.com/#!graphs;ws=31029;t=312594;mspp=9000...

I did some research about how people get weather info: http://ianap.wufoo.com/reports/weather-report/

And out of that, I've been working on a simple weather app: 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!

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.

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

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).

I love this idea, but why do you want permission to access and update my Twitter feed?

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

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.

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.

"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.

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

Try Weddar, a new approach to weather reporting - based on crowdsourcing.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/weddar/id431659526

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It does seem like something's wrong when http://weather.gov is the best place to get weather (within the US, of course.) I just wish NOAA had an iPhone app!

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/

Why you see this as wrong?

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.

This is what I want on my phone. - 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.

>"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...

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

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!

Aside: Google's Market search is seriously broken. Link NSFW-ish:

https://market.android.com/search?q=Anticipates&so=1&...

Same results on a real phone.

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.

I use Fahrenheit for iOS and like it.

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

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-temperatur...

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