Smartphone Geeks: The 5 Best Weather Apps for Android

There is certainly no shortage of Android weather apps on the Google Play Store, but quantity and quality can often be inversely proportional. If you're in the market, you've surely discovered by now that, while it only takes 3 seconds to find a weather app, it can take months of trying out various apps before you actually find a good one.

Knowing this, our panel of Android enthusiasts set out to find the 5 best weather apps for the platform, which proved to be quite the daunting task. The preliminary round of searching involved scouring message boards and reading through user reviews to find 20 apps that were recommended the most. After installing and testing these for a bit, it became clear that nearly half of them just weren't up to snuff. Of the remaining 11, five apps in particular stood out for their unique functionality, and these will be the subjects of today's comparison.

1Weather

The first app in our alphabetized top-5 list offers just about every piece of data you could ask for in a weather app. 1Weather, as it's called, features a tabbed interface that lets you swipe left or right to view current conditions, forecasts, temperature graphs, precipitation tables, an interactive weather map, and even sunrise/sunset times as well as moon phases.

The standout feature here is the weather map, which offers 18 different overlays to help you visualize weather like never before. Radar, clouds, wind speed, wildfires, and hurricanes are just a handful of the overlays that you can add to your weather map, so just about every possible concern is covered here.

1Weather Quick Facts:

Weather Service Used: National Weather Service
Weather Maps: Animated radar, clouds, temperature, dewpoint, humidity, wind wpeed, and UV index overlays
Forecast Length: 10 days (12-week outlook available via almanac data)
Heat Index: Yes ("Feels Like")
Dew Point: Yes
Wind Speed: Yes
Barometric Pressure: Yes
Visibility: Yes
Sunrise/Sunset Times: Yes
Moon Phases: Yes
Widgets: Current conditions, forecast, clock + weather, hourly forecast
Interface: Swipe left or right between tabbed categories
Standout Feature: Weather map has 18 available overlays
Price to Remove Ads: $1.99

Nimbus

Nimbus is unique in the fact that it utilizes Android's new Material Design guidelines more than any other weather app we reviewed. This results in a clean and simple look, where scrolling vertically yields forecast overview cards, that, when tapped, offer an interactive slider to view hourly weather information.

Nimbus is not quite as robust as an app like 1Weather, but its clean interface makes it easy to find the weather information you're looking for, and an animated radar map lets you see when a storm is brewing.

Nimbus Quick Facts:

Weather Service Used: National Weather Service
Weather Maps: Animated Radar
Forecast Length: 7 days
Heat Index: No
Wind Speed: Yes
Barometric Pressure: Yes
Visibility: Yes
Sunrise/Sunset Times: No
Moon Phases: No
Widgets: None
Interface: Scroll vertically, tap an element to expand
Standout Feature: Full use of Material Design
Price to Remove Ads: Ad-free version not available

Weather Timeline

Weather Timeline is the only app in this list that does not offer a free version, but at $0.99, it's still a whale of a deal. The amount of weather data packed into this app rivals any other, but you wouldn't notice it at first glance due to the uniquely streamlined interface, which prioritizes the information by time.

Upon opening the app, you'll be greeted by an overview list of cities that you're following, and when you tap one of these entries, you'll find the timeline. From here, scroll vertically to view weather information for the next 7 days, then tap any entry to expand it for more details.

Weather Timeline sports a nice animated weather map, which includes overlays for radar, clouds, and temperature. A "Graph" section helps you visualize the weather in your area, but perhaps its most unique feature is the "Time Machine," which uses almanac data to show you the projected weather indefinitely into the future.

Weather Timeline Quick Facts:

Weather Service Used: Forecast.io, Weather Underground, YR.no, OpenWeatherMap, World Weather Online (User chooses service)
Weather Maps: Animated radar, clouds, and temperature overlays
Forecast Length: 7 days (2-year outlook available via almanac data)
Heat Index: Yes ("Feels Like")
Wind Speed: Yes
Barometric Pressure: Yes
Visibility: Yes
Sunrise/Sunset Times: Sunset only
Moon Phases: Yes (Interactive "Moon Viewer")
Widgets: Current conditions, forecast, clock + weather, hourly forecast, multi-city weather
Interface: Scroll vertically, tap an element to expand
Standout Feature: Intuitive layout gives the most pertinent weather information at a glance
Price to Remove Ads: $0.99 (Pro version is the only version available)

Yahoo Weather

Perhaps the prettiest of all weather apps for Android, Yahoo Weather is almost as feature-rich as it is visually stunning. As the owners of the photography site Flickr, Yahoo is able to pull beautiful images of your cities under their current weather conditions, which are then used as the background for your weather data.

At first glance, you might think this app is all about looks, but scroll down a bit, and you'll find that Yahoo Weather packs in quite a bit of weather data. All of the usual suspects are here, including a weather map that displays static overlays of the current radar conditions, clouds, and temperatures.

Yahoo Weather Quick Facts:

Weather Service Used: Weather Underground
Weather Maps: Static radar, clouds, heat, and wind speed overlays
Forecast Length: 10 days
Heat Index: Yes ("Feels Like")
Wind Speed: Yes
Barometric Pressure: Yes
Visibility: Yes
Sunrise/Sunset Times: Yes
Moon Phases: Yes
Widgets: Current conditions, clock + weather, hourly forecast
Interface: Scroll vertically for details, swipe left or right for more cities
Standout Feature: Flickr photos of city under current weather conditions
Price to Remove Ads: Ad-free version not available

YoWindow

The final entry in our top 5 is perhaps the most unique. While YoWindow doesn't have as much in-depth weather data as other apps in this list, its interface turns viewing the hourly weather into a fully interactive experience. Simply slide your finger left or right across the screen, and an animated scene will depict the forecast in its entirety—up to and including sunrise, sunset, and the sounds of birds chirping or raindrops falling.

What makes this weather app even more unique is the fact that you can apply its animated depiction of the weather to your home screen with an included live wallpaper. There are several "Landscapes" to choose from, and when selecting your live wallpaper, you'll be given a chance to customize things a bit further. To put it simply, your home screen can now be your weather app—how cool is that?

YoWindow Quick Facts:

Weather Service Used: Weather.gov
Weather Maps: None
Forecast Length: 7 days
Heat Index: Yes ("Feels like")
Wind Speed: No
Barometric Pressure: Yes
Visibility: Yes
Sunrise/Sunset Times: Yes
Moon Phases: Yes (Displayed as percentage)
Widgets: Current conditions, forecast, clock + weather
Interface: Slide finger left or right to view hourly conditions
Standout Feature: Includes animated live wallpaper that depicts current weather
Price to Remove Ads: $2.98

Honorable Mentions

These next 6 apps made it past the initial round of cuts in our testing, but didn't make the final list. In general, this was because they had a lot of functional and aesthetic overlap with our eventual top 5, and the final contenders were just a bit better at doing virtually the same things.

Nonetheless, "better" is a highly subjective term, so you may view these apps in a different light than we did. Add to that the fact that these apps made our top 11 list, and they're certainly worth a look.

AccuWeather has a network connection error that shows up every time you open the app, so the software definitely has a few bugs. Plus, it really doesn't offer anything that 1Weather doesn't, up to and including a very similar interface. Nonetheless, I've always found AccuWeather's underlying weather service to be one of the most accurate available, and that aspect is definitely appealing.

[1] AccuWeather

Arcus Weather utilizes Android's new Material Design guidelines, but lacks in available information when compared to a similar app in Nimbus Weather. Even still, Arcus gets straight to the point, so if you're a fan of simple and clean app design, you might want to give it a try.

[1] Arcus Weather

Eye in the Sky Weather comes across as a dark, "Holo" themed version of Arcus Weather in the sense that it has a simple and clean look that mainly only focuses on hourly temperatures and chance of precipitation. While Arcus has a dark theme to match Eye in the Sky, this app separates itself by offering multiple icon sets.

[1] Eye in the Sky Weather

Google Now is more about providing you with general information than it is about weather in particular. But since the app is so useful in general, you may want to give it a try as a catchall service to minimize the amount of installed apps on your phone.

[1] Google Now weather

GO Weather is functionally and aesthetically similar to Yahoo Weather, but the background images are generic rather than specific to a city, and some of the finer details from Yahoo Weather aren't available here. On the plus side, though, users can download themes to personalize the app.

[1] GO Weather

WeatherBug has been around for longer than almost any app on this list, but the downside here is that its age is starting to show. On the bright side, in spite of its outdated UI, WeatherBug still proves its usefulness with a rock-solid weather service behind it all.

[1] WeatherBug

Conclusion

Let me start by saying that I've been an avid Yahoo Weather user since the app debuted, and I went into this article thinking my personal bias would make it really hard for any other app to top this list. That said, after extensively testing these apps and factoring in feedback from other Android users, Yahoo Weather came in a distant second in the rankings here.

The app that converted this long-time Yahoo user, while simultaneously garnering a unanimous first place vote, was none other than Weather Timeline. The clean and simple UI, uniquely-optimized layout, subtle animations, and great list of features made this app stand out in almost every regard.

What is your favorite weather app for Android? Did it make our list? Let us know in the comment section below, or drop us a line on Android Hacks' Facebook or Twitter, or Gadget Hacks' Facebook, Google+, or Twitter.

Smartphone Geeks

Freitag, 7. August 2015

The 5 Best Weather Apps for Android