Why are weather apps still so terrible these days? | Hacker News Reader

Why are weather apps still so terrible these days?

theatlantic.com

47 pointskimnamjoon26 comments

Apple's new weather app is fun lately. My SO and I will sit next to each other on the couch, each with the new Apple weather app open to our town. The two instances of the app will show contradictory information. In most cases, neither instance of the app reflects what's actually going on outside. We live just outside a major city so it's not like we're in an unknown area. Needless to say, I really miss Dark Sky and mostly use the NWS mobile site now. -_-

https://www.weather.gov/ is all you need

I love the wX app on Android for access to NWS data. Open source, free, no ads, and lots of data and customizability.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=joshuatee.wx

This. The best "weather app" is my bookmark to the NWS forecast in my area. The best part is that NWS doesn't name ordinary storms.

https://yr.no works great for northern europe

Yeah it's pretty good though the UI for hourly forecasts could use a bit of a touch up.

Well if you are in the US..

but its pretty great.

Been a fan of https://merrysky.net/ recently

I always have a tab open with merrysky. I really like the extra detail they show in the graph of wind/temp/precipitation and the break down of the day.

For Seattle area in particular most weather apps will show the entire week as cloudy and rainy, but there is a lot more to it and merrysky is able to surface that.

Best I've found as well. The dev was also very kinda and responsive about fixing a (minor) graphical bug I reported.

https://archive.is/ezISr

For Germany, the DWD weather app [1] is pretty great. I'm usually able to avoid specific rain moments based on their localized cloud mapping. The DWD is a federal agency. [2]

[1] https://www.dwd.de/EN/ourservices/warnwetteapp/warnwetterapp...

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.dwd.warnapp

https://apps.apple.com/de/app/warnwetter/id986420993

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutscher_Wetterdienst

But you have to pay for forecasts from a government run app? On their app homepage it’s due to a court ruling??

Yes, this is true. A competitor won a lawsuit against DWD. Their competition was considered unfair, as they are publicly funded. They either had to charge money or run advertisements and, against this background, opted for a one-time payment.

https://www.bundesgerichtshof.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilung...

https://nwsnow.net/ weather app for Android, no ads, no tracking, data straight from NOAA and NWS.

Looks nice enough. Why isn't this on the Play Store?

I don't mind the stock Android/Pixel weather app, but I have no idea why it requires pixel perfect accuracy to launch it from the stock home screen. And if there's any sort of traffic alert or reminder that displays adjacent to the weather on the home screen it usually takes me 3-5 attempts to launch the weather app. Have the flashlight on? Can't check the weather! It's been like this for as long as I can remember.

On Android, I've found an excellent combination.

Flowx has an extremely innovative display of very fine scaled data from a wide range of US, Canadian, EU and other weather agencies (NOAA GFS, CMC GDPS, ECMHWF HIRES, CMC RDPS, CMC HRDPS, DWD ICON Global, NOAA NAM, NOAA HRR, down to 3km resolution). The UI for manipulating the data display is wonderful.

Foreca has a great at-a-glance current and forecast listing.

Rainy Days has excellent recent-to-current radar display.

No relation with any other than happy customer.

Just a note that Flowx label their ECMWF forecast as "HIRES" when it's the open-data >40km resolution 6 hourly data with limited parameters and not the actual HIRES 9km resolution 1 hourly.

I like Windy.com to compare models.

I use https://www.windy.com/

It gives me prediction models and large set of data sources in one platform. It's definitely more information than you need than a "weather app" but maybe you can learn thing or two while you are at it even if you are not a weather nerd...

I found Dark Sky almost 100% accurate in terms of predicting rain. Since Apple added rain predictions I’ve found it almost 100% accurate too.

Really? My Apple rain predictions are nearly 0% accurate. It’s more of a “low level cloud” forecast more than anything else

I guess this is the sort of thing that, like the weather, is going to vary for every single user.

I link on my phone to the national weather service for my area. Opens a website, looks like and app but is the best.

there is always a good moment to 'curl wttr.in'

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