Weather Up’s new interactive widget makes it a weather app very much worth checking out
One of my favorite iOS weather apps just got a very cool new update.
I actually first wrote about Weather Up way back in 2017. At the time it was called Weather Atlas, and this is what I had to say about it:
“Ever since iOS gained an App Store in 2008, allowing developers to write their own applications for iPhone, I’ve been on the hunt for the perfect weather app. Nine. Years. In all that time I’ve experimented with many weather apps from many developers. None of them quite hit the mark. Some of them wildly missed it. I can think of no other category of app in which perfection has been so elusive. I think one of the big challenges to creating a great weather app is that weather is a data-heavy category. Organizing that data in a way that is pleasant for the layman to interact with is an enormous task. But after almost a decade of searching and waiting, I think my search may be at an end.”
I used Weather Up for a long time, but at some point I moved away from it. Probably a mix of my insatiable desire for the absolute perfect weather app, and the new infusion of work that Apple put into Apple Weather during and after Apple’s acquisition of Dark Sky.
I’m very happy to say that Weather Up is back with a great new use of Interactive Widgets, a feature that Apple added in iOS 17. Here’s what Apple says about Interactive Widgets:
“Widgets on your Home Screen, Lock Screen, and StandBy are even more useful with interactivity. Just tap a widget to complete tasks like checking off a to-do item, controlling your living room lights, or playing a new podcast episode.”
Weather Up has implemented the best use of Interactive Widgets I’ve seen from any developer so far. You can see an example of their new widget in the screenshot above. It’s a pretty simple weather line graph that shows the high and low temperatures and weather conditions over the next few days. If you use the right-facing arrow in the bottom right corner of the widget, you can change the view to show the next few days in the future. If you tap on any one of the individual days on the widget, the view changes to show you the forecast for that specific day. If there’s rain in the forecast for the next hour, a Next Hour section appears on the left of the widget and tapping on it shows the precipitation forecast for the next hour. That’s a lot of information you can get just from the widget itself without going into the full app.
When you do go to the full app, you’re treated to what I think is the best layout of any weather app on iOS. You get a full screen weather app using the basic Apple Maps display, with a card overlaid on the bottom with all of the current conditions and forecast data. The developers of Weather Up clearly get that maps are super important in a weather app. It continues to bug me that Apple imported Dark Sky’s ugly and hard to read map view into Apple Weather, and that you can’t set Apple Weather to always show a precipitation map. What Weather Up has done is absolutely perfect.
The only big feature I want in a future release is a weather map widget to go along with the excellent widget they currently have.
The app is free, but if you want the interactive widget, you need to upgrade to the paid version, which is a $4/month or $40/year subscription. That’s not cheap, but weather data is expensive for app developers. Plus, if you rely on a weather app daily, and you do, it’s absolutely worth it.
Give Weather Up a try and let me know what you think!