Is this what Apple Weather for iPad will look like?
2022 could be the year that iPadOS finally gets a version of Apple Weather. One designer has put together a glimpse at what that could be like.
The iPad has been with us since 2010, and in all that time Apple has never seen fit (or maybe just never gotten around) to bringing the iPhone’s Weather app over. It makes sense for the iPhone to have Apple Weather if only one device is going to get it. After all, that’s the one you take with you everywhere, in all conditions, but I’ve always wanted an iPad-native version of Apple Weather as well. Apple invested pretty heavily in Apple Weather in 2020 after having not done much with it over the years. That year is when it purchased Dark Sky, one of the most popular third-party weather apps for iOS, and began incorporating its real-time weather predictions. Last year with iOS 15, Apple gave Weather it’s first major infusion of new features in its history. The app now features much more data, and finally weather radar maps. I’m hoping that at this year’s WWDC, one of the major announcements for iPadOS is that Apple Weather is coming. Finally.
In the meantime, independent designer Timo Weigelt has done a mockup of how he imagines Apple might bring Apple Weather to the iPad, and I think it looks great. One of the challenges of scaling up from an iPhone app to an iPad app is figuring out what to do with all of the extra space. A lot of weather apps have struggled with making an iPad version of their app that takes good advantage of that extra screen real estate. (Frankly Dark Sky’s implementation of that was not great.) But the more widget-y style of Apple Weather in iOS 15 lends itself quite well the iPad, as Weigelt demonstrates in this project. He takes it one step farther to imagine Apple letting you add, subtract, and re-arrange the various widget-style tiles in Apple Weather. I’d love that idea, but I doubt that’s the approach Apple will take. Still on the whole I think this is a really good conceptualization of what Apple is going to do with Apple Weather on iPadOS. This of course would also work quite well on the Mac, and I hope that Apple brings Apple Weather there as well. WWDC will be here in just over a month, so we’ll know then if Apple has plans to bring Apple Weather to the iPad and the Mac.
Via 9to5Mac