
The iOS weather-app market - kingsidharth
http://www.marco.org/2011/04/26/iphone-weather-apps
======
tolmasky
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.

~~~
Entlin
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?

~~~
ebiester
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.

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

~~~
loire280
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?

------
sudonim
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!

~~~
spydez
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.

~~~
stevenbedrick
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).

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

------
togasystems
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.

~~~
adriand
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.

------
mirkules
"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.

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

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

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

~~~
pkteison
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.

~~~
ratsbane
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.

------
mronge
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.

------
ghaff
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.

~~~
oddthink
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!

~~~
Turing_Machine
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/>

------
pwenzel
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.

------
porterhaney
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.

------
fr0sty
>"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...

------
digitalruse
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>

~~~
dbro
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!

~~~
TillE
Aside: Google's Market search is _seriously_ broken. Link NSFW-ish:

[https://market.android.com/search?q=Anticipates&so=1&...](https://market.android.com/search?q=Anticipates&so=1&c=apps)

Same results on a real phone.

------
dazzla
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.

------
noelchurchill
I use Fahrenheit for iOS and like it.

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

------
pitdesi
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...](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/fahrenheit-weather-
temperature/id426939660?mt=8)

