Friday April 22, 2022; 9:22 AM EDT
- I like having weather apps on my phone that runs Android, and I use several of them. In the past I relied on Dark Sky, which had a great hyperlocal forecast that sent me notifications when it was about to rain or snow at my exact location. The notifications were good too, generally within ten minutes it would start raining. Then Apple bought Dark Sky and killed the Android app and I was left to find an alternative. #
- Most Android sites stated that AccuWeather was the next best thing to DarkSky, and so that is what I got and paid to not have ads. AccuWeather has a hyperlocal radar that shows me when it is about to rain or snow but for some reason it doesn't send notifications. I found The Weather Channel app does provide notifications like DarkSky did, so I use the free version of it just for the notifications. #
- A few weeks ago I learned that AccuWeather was introducing a Premium+ subscription that adds "AccuWeather alerts" that I assume would be as good as The Weather Channel, and thus buying the subscription would enable me to remove The Weather Channel app. AccuWeather also changed their persistent notification to stop displaying the temperature, which was a real dick move. Regardless, I bought the subscription but so far I haven't seen any AccuWeather alerts so beginning to regret that decision. #
- To complete the picture, other weather apps I use are RadarScope, Windy, and Storm Shield. RadarScope is considered to be the best radar app on any platform and I see it used by meteorologists. Windy does a great job of showing me the wind direction, which is important to me when I take my walks during the winter, and it has some really nice weather visualizations on the phone that are different than other apps. Finally Storm Shield is basically a NOAA weather radio that provides me audio severe weather alerts wherever I am located. (Yes, we have a weather radio in our bedroom in case there is a tornado warning in the middle of the night.)#