Weather apps for iPhone

How the category divides

Start with how each developer makes its money, because the three answers are genuinely different. Weather Underground is ad-supported: its free app carries advertising, and alongside a feature subscription it sells a second, cheaper subscription whose only job is to take the ads away. CARROT Weather sells capability in levels — a Premium tier, a Premium Ultra tier above it, and a Family option its FAQ describes as Ultra shared with up to five people through Family Sharing — and every one of those is a subscription, with no way to buy the app outright. Hello Weather sits between them in complexity and outside them in kind: one paid tier with a Family variant, sold monthly, yearly, or once. It is the only app of the three you can pay for and then stop paying for.

Now the thing all three have in common, which is the reason this category is worth writing about at all. Not one of the three developers publishes a current price on its own site. CARROT’s support FAQ is the most striking case, because it is not an omission so much as a near miss: it answers the pricing question at length, names all three levels, assigns specific features to each, and explains why the app is sold by subscription rather than once — and never states a figure anywhere in the answer. Weather Underground’s FAQ describes its memberships and what they remove, and names no figure either. Hello Weather’s site publishes no pricing at all. Three companies, three different models, and the same silence in the same place.

The silence does not make the figures disappear. It relocates them, and they degrade on the way. CARROT’s do exist on its press kit, but that page was written for a particular past release and sits among that release’s feature announcements, so what it names is what the levels cost then rather than what they cost now. The other place figures live is the App Store’s in-app-purchase list, which is generated from what a developer currently sells — and in CARROT’s case it does not agree with the press kit. It carries extra items under the same tier names that nothing published accounts for, and items under a name that appears in no documentation at all. It also omits, entirely, a tier that both the FAQ and the App Store description describe. What a reader is left with is three sources, no statement of which one is current, and a purchase sheet inside the app as the only place the real number is guaranteed to appear.

The third dividing line is a pricing question wearing a feature question’s clothes, and it is the one this category turns on. CARROT’s FAQ does something unusual: it lists its notifications and its map layers region by region, saying plainly which are worldwide and which exist only in particular countries. Read those two lists against each other and a consequence falls out that no price tag will ever show you. A subscriber in the United States receives every notification and every map layer the app offers. A subscriber in Europe loses lightning, storm cell and convective outlook notifications, and loses satellite, active warnings, visibility, precipitation, snow depth, individual radar stations, storm cells, wildfires and fronts from the maps. A subscriber outside every named region keeps the worldwide rows and nothing else. All three of them pay the same.

The gating also compounds, which is what makes it more than a curiosity. The three notifications restricted to the United States are the same three that require the more expensive Ultra tier rather than plain Premium. Severe-weather alerting — for a great many people the entire reason to pay for a weather app in the first place — therefore sits behind two doors: buy the upper level, and live in the right country. Neither door is visible from an App Store listing, and only one of them is something a buyer can do anything about.

Whether the other two apps have the same problem is simply not knowable from what they publish. Weather Underground’s listing and FAQ say nothing about which of its features vary by country. Hello Weather says nothing either, beyond noting that its air quality and pollen information depends on which data source is selected. That is not evidence that either is unrestricted — it is the absence of evidence in both directions, and it sits in the unresolved list below rather than being read either way. CARROT deserves credit on exactly this point: it is the only one of the three that tells you, and its telling you is the only reason the problem is visible at all.

Which page to read

What CARROT Weather costs is the page to read first, even though it covers only one of the three apps, because it is where everything above is worked out in full: the FAQ that explains the pricing without pricing it, the press kit and the in-app-purchase list that disagree with each other, the complete regional lists for notifications and map layers, and a tier-by-tier account of which feature sits behind which level. Read it if you are considering CARROT at all — and read its regional section before subscribing rather than after, because that is the part that decides what the subscription is actually worth where you live.

CARROT Weather vs. Weather Underground sets the tiered-subscription model against the ad-supported one, which is the widest gap in the category. It covers what each developer’s money actually buys, the forecast data each app is built on, and where — or whether — each publishes its prices. Read it if your objection to free weather apps is the advertising rather than the missing features, because Weather Underground is the only app here that will sell you their removal on its own, separately from and more cheaply than its feature subscription.

CARROT Weather vs. Hello Weather puts the two subscription apps against each other, and turns on a question the tier names hide: whether you can ever stop paying. It covers how many paid levels each app has, what each free version keeps, which forecast providers each one unlocks, and the outright purchase that only one of them offers. Read it if you have already decided you want a paid weather app and the open question is whether to rent one indefinitely or buy one once.

What we couldn’t verify

These questions are left open by the sources behind the pages above. They are carried here unresolved rather than guessed at.

• What any CARROT tier currently costs. Its FAQ names no figure, its press kit’s figures belong to a past release, and its App Store in-app-purchase list carries more figures than either page accounts for
• Why that in-app-purchase list carries two further figures each for Premium and Premium Ultra, which nothing Grailr publishes explains
• What CARROT Premium Mini is, or what it includes. It appears only in the in-app-purchase list and is named nowhere in the FAQ or the press kit
• What CARROT Premium Family costs, or whether it is still sold, since no item of that name appears in the in-app-purchase list while both the FAQ and the App Store description describe the tier
• Which features belong to CARROT Premium Ultra, since its FAQ and its App Store description give different lists for that tier
• Whether CARROT’s regional lists are exhaustive, or whether other features vary by country without being listed
• What CARROT does with no subscription once its trial ends, which its FAQ does not state
• Whether Weather Underground’s feature subscription includes ad removal, or whether the cheaper Ad-Free subscription is required for that as well
• Which Weather Underground features vary by country, which neither its listing nor its FAQ addresses
• Whether Hello Weather’s outright purchase covers future data sources and features, or only those present when it is bought
• Which of Hello Weather’s data sources carry air quality and pollen information, which its listing makes conditional without naming them
• Whether any app’s in-app subscription price matches a figure on its developer’s own site, which App Store listings do not show
• How accurate any of these apps’ forecasts are in practice, which no published source establishes for any of them

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