For me one of the major uses for my iDevices has always been finding out about the weather. From the start there was an Apple supplied app solely for this purpose and from my memory The Weather Channel app has always been available as well. Since you can’t delete the core apps the pretty much means I’ve always had two ways of getting current weather conditions. TWC app has always been one of the first apps I installed since when I think weather, it’s self-evident that I should get my information from the channel that dedicates itself to all things weather (and massively oversold videos of “amazing things that I’ll never believe.)
Outside of some random invalid days* I’ve never had much reason to question the quality of TWC forecasts. They always seem to be fairly accurate (aside from the massive amounts of weather terrorism** that seem rampant.) So of course I use that app primarily.
TWC has such a great brand that I’ve been attached to them for years. But why does being better than average at predicting weather mean you have the technical skills required to present it? The number of times I’ve attempted to go to the website to find that it won’t load, pages cannot be found, or the UI is completely messed up is far greater than any other site I visit on a regular basis. I wish I had an app that tracked stats on my internet usage so I could see what percent of my traffic was targeted at the TWC site and how many times it failed me. So why does this crappy website have my loyalty when it comes to apps? It must be an incredible app!
But it’s not. In the picture I have a snapshot of three apps; TWC, Yahoo! Weather, and Weather by Apple and their respective home screens. From the home screen for TWC I can tell that I’m in St Louis Park. There’s a cloud blocking the sun (sunrise was at 7:32.) The high will be 21 and the low will be 12, but at the time it was actually 2. Oh and it has a pretty picture hidden by a huge circle. Somehow the Yahoo! app, which is powered by TWC (why wouldn’t it be?), is slightly better. It’s aware that the sun hasn’t risen yet and that the current temperature of the day probably shouldn’t be lower than the low. Most of the screen is covered by a pretty picture of stars that it got from flickr. Lastly, the Apple Weather app, which in my opinion used to be terrible. So bad in fact that for a while the starry night icon confused people into thinking that it was going to snow in places where that doesn’t happen. Now I think it’s way better. At a glance I can see current temperature, high and low for the day, it knows that the sun hasn’t risen yet but that it’s about to, I can see the days progression for the next few hours and the highs and lows and expectation of each day of the week. Of course this is also powered by TWC and is blissfully unaware of the current vs low dilemma.
All of the apps have one more obvious shortcoming in my mind. If I’m looking at the weather to know exactly what to expect if I go outside right now then they all fail. They all display current temp, but none of them show the “Feels like” without having to search for it. I think it’s clear by looking at the first two apps that this is the primary use case that they’re trying to solve on their home screen which makes this a far more egregious oversight and I can’t imagine why it’s not there. As anybody who has survived a winter in Minnesota can vouch for, without knowing the wind chill you don’t know the current weather.
I’m using this post as my argument for why I need to break the habit and switch weather apps. For anybody who has had an in person conversation with me you know that when something draws my ire I can get on a diatribe about even the most mundane details, and now I have about weather apps.
*Invalid days are days such as Thursday/Friday in the picture above, in which it’s mathematically(?) impossible for the high on Thursday to be 19 and the low on Friday to be WAY HIGHER than 19.
**A weather terrorist is somebody who latches on to the worst case weather scenario and then reports that as fact with the sole purpose of scaring everyone watching. See Also: Tsnownami.
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