6 Must Have Weather Widgets For Android

6 Must Have Weather Widgets For Android

While the weather is something you typically just mention during small talk, it’s one of the major factors shaping how you go about your day. The weather dictates your daily routine, from deciding what to wear to figuring out where to spend the rest of your day to planninghow to store your motorcycle. That’s why, unless you’re cooped up indoors all year long, staying in the loop with your local weather is always a good idea.

But let’s be real — you might not always have the time to tune into the early morning weather report or search online for weather updates. In such cases, you’re able to rely on weather apps instead. These nifty utilities are convenient and impressively accurate, saving you from wearing a sleeveless top on a cold day or getting caught in downpours without an umbrella. If you’re on Android, these apps come with an extra perk: widgets. That means you don’t even have to launch the app just to check the weather — just a quick glance at your screen, and you’re all set. If you’re looking for the best widgets to add to your home screen, here are six of the must-have ones based on first-hand experience and Google Play Store reviews. There will be a more in-depth explanation of our methodology for picking these apps at the end of this article.

The Weather Channel

With 100 million downloads and almost three million reviews on the Google Play Store,The Weather Channelproves to be one of the most reliableweather apps for Android. It gets its accurate forecast from the collaboration of a team of about 100 expert meteorologists and modern technology, most notably cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI), and IBM’s proprietary Global High-Resolution Atmospheric Forecasting (GRAF) system. GRAF is run on a supercomputer, refreshes hourly, and offers detailed coverage down to a three-kilometer resolution for top-notch accuracy.

The Weather Channel app comes with six widgets:

Featuring a comprehensive suite of forecasts, such as a 12-day weather forecast, a detailed 48-hour rain and temperature forecast, and even local forecast videos and news, the1Weatherapp caters to a wide array of needs. It pulls its data from DTN WeatherOps, which, in turn, is backed by more than 200 meteorologists, data engineers, and data scientists who analyze a diverse mix of inputs, including modeled, historical, and hyper-local. The 1Weather app also includes alerts from the United States National Weather Service (NWS) whenever available in your current location.

As for the widgets, there’s a total of 12 options you’re able to pick from that display two different sorts of information:

To personalize the widget, you can change its accent color, background theme (dark, light, transparent), and background transparency. You can enjoy 1Weather free of charge, but if you prefer to remove the ads (which pop up in the app itself and not the widgets), you can opt for the Pro version for $4.99.

WeatherBug

Leveraging a global network of professional-grade weather stations and sensors,WeatherBugoffers real-time hyper-local reports to help you stay on top of the weather. It includes a host of handy features, such as lightning alerts that work with your phone’s GPS and the WeatherBug total lightning network to tell you how near the closest lightning is. There are also Doppler radar weather maps, curated weather news for your area, and severe weather alerts from official sources like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and NWS in the U.S., National Meteorological Service (NMS) in the U.K. and Germany, and Servicio Meteorológico Nacional (SMN) in Mexico.

To add the weather data to your home screen, WeatherBug has five widgets of different sizes but with similar general details.

Yahoo Weather

If you’re tired of weather apps with boring interfaces, check outYahoo Weather. Its minimalist full-screen UI showcases the essential data you’ll need for the day laid out on a single page with a random Flickr photo of your location as a nice visual treat. Yahoo Weather gets its data from Weather Underground, which is known for its robust forecasting system. In the U.S., Weather Underground relies on a vast network of over 250,000 personal weather stations, nearly 2,000 Automated Surface Observation System (ASOS) stations, and more than 26,000 stations from NOAA’s Meteorological Assimilation Data Ingest System (MADIS). For international weather, Weather Underground taps into roughly 6,000 airport-based automated weather stations, 8,000 personal weather stations, and 16,000 MADIS stations worldwide.

Yahoo Weather offers seven widgets to beautify your home screen, each of which also features scenic backdrops:

Yahoo Weather is completely free, though it does include ads within the app.

Weather & Radar

Weather & Radaris among the leading weather apps, with over 100 million downloads and a 4.4-star rating from the Google Play Store. What sets it apart from the rest is that it delivers detailed forecasts, going as granular as 90 minutes ahead. You can also find niche information in the app, such as marine weather (high and low tide) and astronomy (sun and moon rise and set times). To provide accurate predictions, Weather & Radar is powered by a combination of advanced machine learning and data from esteemed sources like the NOAA’sGeostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES)and the UK Met Office.

When it comes to the widgets, you’re able to choose from four available options:

True to its name,YoWindowaims to show you exactly what you can expect to see when you look outside your window. Its interface changes to reflect the current season, weather conditions, and sun and moon position at specific times of the day. But more than aesthetics, YoWindow provides high-precision weather data, too. It sources its current and forecast weather from various references, including the NWS, Foreca Nowcasting, Open Weather Map, the Norwegian Meteorological Institute, and the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK), over 4,000 METAR weather stations, and other radar and satellite images. What’s cool about YoWindow is that it also allows you to change the app’s weather service to your preferred source to get more reliable local data.

Widgets-wise, YoWindow features six different-sized options for your home screen:

You can purchase the ad-free version of YoWindow for $0.99 for one month or $9.99 for life.

Why these apps?

The apps that made it to this list were selected based on how well they’re received (which means at least a 4.5-star rating) and how popular they are (at least ten million downloads and 400,000 user reviews) on the Google Play Store. The features offered by each app’s widgets were also considered, such as the variety in sizes, customizability, style, and details in the display, to ensure they cater to different user needs and preferences. After the selection, all the apps were then installed and personally tested.