Now it's probably the worst app on my phone and I should just delete it. It takes forever to start, more than half the time it loads no data, and even if it is loaded the UI redesign has made the whole thing slow and useless.

Would love suggestions for another app on Android.

If you are in the United States, nothing beats getting the forecast straight from the horses mouth (NWS that is). Some companies are notorious for producing 30+ day forecasts, which can't have any meaningful levels of skill.

NOAA/NWS should just create their own mobile application. I use Wx[1], which parses NWS data directly and can be found on f-droid[2] and g---le play.

Granted, Wx doesn't follow Material Design for Android in the slightest, but I like it that way because it's very information-dense, snappy, and light (unlike r--ct "native" and other JS toolkits out there).

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19775291

[1]: https://gitlab.com/joshua.tee/wx

[2]: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/joshuatee.wx/

I agree that NWS [text] forecasts are usually the best, though it can be time consuming to digest them. Nate Silver's book [1] makes the interesting point that commercial forecasts almost always reduce the quality of the input data they're given from NOAA, but that part of this boils down to incentives: Nobody complains if you forecast a small chance of rain and it turns out to be sunny. The problem spot is in ruining someone's picnic. Hence, forecasts tend to bias heavily towards rain.

[0]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-06-14/trump-s-p...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Signal_and_the_Noise

Your blanket statement doesn't always hold. This is more accurate.

Have there any been any comparisons of the commercial services to NWS? That would be an interesting casual study.

Edit: There are some additional interesting comments downthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22740480

I am. Spend some time in the desert southwest, particularly on indian reservations. You'll find that NWS temperatures are regularly off by 10-20°. But that's still better than Weather Underground, which can be off by as much as 50°.

One thing I will give the NWS credit for is the wind forecasts. Those things are spot-on at least 90% of the time.

I've lived in 15 cities in a dozen states, and what I've noticed is that if you're in a large city, or east of a large city, the forecasts are great.

But if you're west of a large city, or in a smaller city, it's hit-or-miss. This makes sense, as the better forecasters tend to end up in the larger markets.

Even smaller cities like Minneapolis, Buffalo, Sioux Falls, Albany, and hundreds more are located where they are because waterfalls and rapids made them the farthest extent of water travel before rapids or waterfalls or other hazards made the route too difficult.

After finding no substitutes, I started making my own weather app (for my own private use) this week to duplicate that functionality. But of course I was using the Dark Sky API which will now get shut down. I just can't win this one!

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.samruston....

Sadly at some point they weren't able to pay for the dark sky API anymore and since then the quality of forecasts is a bit less convincing. I'm still rather shocked by the low reviews though, for me it works well and I love that you can add a dozen cities and see the forecast.

Supposedly they're still fixing bugs from the new weather provider before it's made public, but it hasn't been updated in ten months. I doubt it will be improved anymore, and I don't really use it much since the new provider is mediocre at best.

It's beautifully designed, has an excellent selection of widgets, and is open source.

You can even set your lock screen to be a live wallpaper of the current weather.

[1] https://github.com/WangDaYeeeeee/GeometricWeather/

I really think this shows how direly we need "public interest" services on our phone.

Great information density, clean interface and has by the far the best widget of any weather app I've seen. It manages to display so much information with graphs without being visually overloaded.

But please, let's not tell anyone else about this - I am tired of my favorite apps always getting ruined.

The same thing is happening in the podcasting ecosystem right now. it's turning more and more into a walled garden.

Alternatively, people just like money.

I'd much rather take whatever large amount of cash to basically ensure my needs and those of my future offsprings are taken care of for a very long time, if not for life.

That fiction, if I have it right, is that selling your company is a merger. That you are a lesser peer and that you will still have a great deal of influence in the resulting company. And there are people who manage that, but most do not. And not only that, your payout is delayed and contingent on you keeping your former employees from getting too surly. Sometimes for several years.

And since your story was supposed to be about how much you sacrificed and how hard you worked to sell your company and became successful, are you really going to be frank and honest with yourself and those who ask, or are you going put on a brave face?

I wonder how many of the “money doesn’t buy happiness” nouveau-riche mean something like the problems listed above when they say that. “I reached my goal and it wasn’t what I wanted.”

I suppose if the goal is to just see some technology or technique or idea become more broadly adopted, this isn't a bad thing. But what about poor-implementations of a good concept (UI/UX bloat, user-hostile business models, etc.) Honestly, I'm not sure. Is this analogous to the trends that drive consolidation of firms in general?

I guess this is a round-about say of saying that selling-out is probably the most rational thing to do, but please prove me wrong.

What is the purpose behind "censoring" Google's name here...?

I use Yr weather (from the Norwegian Broadcasting Institute and Meteorological Institute) which is... fine, but their source of data isn't great for my location.

Almost everything else I've tried is some combination of slow, poorly designed, or not-privacy-respecting, even if I'm willing to pay.

Dark Sky is shuttering their Android app after being acquired by Apple. People are saying things like "Now I will have zero good weather apps for Android. "

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22740331

Flowx is better than Dark Sky!

I haven't been able to find this type of notification in Flowx. Am I missing this, or by chance is it cmoing?

That said, the to-do list is super long so it might be a while before this feature is done. I depends on demand.

That said, Rainviewer is working on predicting rain from radar images for up to 2 hours ahead. Check them out and ask when this feature might appear. They might have beta testing and your situation sounds like a good test case.

I never used the WU app, but I do use the WU website regularly and feel that it is very slow and spammy and bad UI, etc., etc.

The problem is, I cannot find anyone else to give me a 10 day forecast.

How can I tease out a 10-day forecast from weather.gov ?

You could also use the NOAA's global weather simulations, some of which go out to 16 days: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/model-data/model-datas...

Luckily the base station is easy to scrape for the raw data locally, but still.

> There is no better place to accomplish these goals than at Apple. We’re thrilled to have the opportunity to reach far more people, with far more impact, than we ever could alone.

So how exactly does cutting off literally billions of potential users allow them to "reach far more people"?

[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=widget.dd.com....