Weather Up 3.0, released today, pushes iOS 17’s interactive widgets. Fully interactive widgets allow you to touch on the forecast to view additional data about current circumstances or the days ahead. Developer David Barnard wants to “put a whole weather app in a widget.”
Barnard, a self-described “weather nerd” and developer of Launch Center Pro, has been working on Weather Up with Brock Batsell on nights and weekends while working as a growth advocate at subscription management startup RevenueCat.
The intention was to create an Apple Watch complication to display the weather at a glance, but widget support changed things. As they prepared to introduce their first widgets, Apple stated that iOS 17 would make widgets interactive. They relocated again to start using the new feature.
“This is the nice part about it being a side hustle,” Barnard said. “I can postpone these launches and do really cool stuff and tinker.” It would not be possible if the app were his main business, covered his expenses, or had investors backing it in exchange for a return.
Those efforts yielded a novel iPhone weather and prediction app.
The new widget shows the following four days’ prediction, including rain. Tap the rain prediction to see the 60-minute forecast and when the rain is predicted to finish. Tap any day on the widget to zoom in on hourly conditions. Hourly and daily predictions let you tap an arrow to advance time. That way, you can determine if the soccer game this weekend will be rainy or sunny.
The Tide Guide app creator Tucker MacDonald gave Barnard the concept for the prediction arrow to progress, and he helped solve technical problems concerning its implementation.
By default, Weather Up uses Apple’s Weather, which was Dark Sky before Apple’s takeover. Barnard believes Apple has improved the service since then, making it the most trustworthy for most consumers. You can switch the app and widget to AerisWeather or AccuWeather if other weather sources are more accurate in certain markets. (Or, like Barnard, install three widgets on your iPhone’s home screen from different sources to discover which is more accurate!)
According to reports, creating an interactive weather widget proved difficult.
Barnard says, “These APIs just came out with iOS 17, so they are very new.” We must work around bugs. It’s difficult since few have explored this deeply, he says. That means that when engineers found a flaw, there wasn’t anything available on how to fix it. Apple limits the frequency of interactive widget updates.
Batsell created code to refresh the widget every 15 minutes, if not more often, an “incredible feat,” says Barnard, considering Apple’s system limits. When the user interacts with the widget, the built-in constraints are relaxed, and it may refresh its data.
The widget gives enough forecast and weather information to avoid launching the app, but it lacks details. The app has humidity, wind, cloud cover, “feels like” temperature, and radar maps.
Weather data isn’t free; therefore, the app costs $4 per month or $40 per year. It’s $40 because Weather Up is taking advantage of Apple’s new pricing that lets developers avoid $.99. Weather Up also uses RevenueCat’s subscription management API, and Barnard plans to utilize it as a case study to demonstrate its benefits.
Weather Up is an iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and iMessage app.
