AppWeather Is The Black Sheep Of iPhone Weather Apps
AppWeather ($0.99) by Daniel Toranzo Perez is a simple weather app for your iPhone.
I'll start out by saying I was expecting a lot more out of this app. I love simple weather apps, as my current favorite is Shine, which I reviewed a while back. However, AppWeather could go down as one of my most-hated weather apps, because it looks and works like something thrown together in 10 minutes.
The first thing you do on launching the app is to enter a location. There is no prompt for location services for convenient, automatic data fetching of local conditions.
To enter a location, the app will ask you to use zip codes specifically for better search results. However, you can get away with just entering in the name of a city, though if there are two cities with the same name, the app will not ask you which one--it will just bring up whichever city it feels like showing you.
But sometimes AppWeather won't even give you results--it will just say "Weather forecast not available for this location. Please check your Internet connection." Last I checked, "New York, New York" was a valid location. I'm not sure where AppWeather pulls its data from, but it seems to be a terrible database.
Once you finally get your location selected, you'll finally be able to view your weather conditions! What a relief, right?
You'll see the location name, current conditions (i.e. Sunny, Cloudy, Showers, etc), temperature (including the high and low), humidity, and wind direction and speed. Just like you'd expect from a decent weather app. The time is displayed should you use this as a nightstand app. There's also a pretty animated background for you to look at as you check out the weather information.
For some of the backgrounds, it makes it hard to see the information since the developer chose to display the text in white. The text also does not change to black depending on the background, which would have been nice, since reading white text in clouds is kind of hard to do.
But hey, what if you need to check the weather conditions for two locations, like your home and work? Or if you're one of those people that likes to see the weather for places that you might be traveling to in the very-near future? You'll have to repeat the process of searching and adding a location, because AppWeather does not save multiple locations. It's just the one location.
Personally, I find this unacceptable for a weather app. There needs to be the ability to save multiple locations, because it's almost impossible to just be in one location all the time.
In addition to not being able to save multiple locations, you also can't customize anything about the app--like choosing between celsius or fahrenheit (only celsius is shown for temperatures), kilometers or miles per hour (AppWeather likes miles), or a.m. and p.m. versus 24-hour format for the time.
There's no consistency--why are temperatures in metric units, while wind speed is in the Imperial standard?
Though the app seems to be consistent in backgrounds. While I was searching for various locations, I kept getting a lot of "Sunny" conditions, but the same cloudy background. At this point, I'm not even sure if the app is even trying. The backgrounds are just less awesome versions of what is offered in Weather HD, anyway.
The bottom line is: stay far, far away from this app. There are plenty of better options for getting weather information on your iPhone.
