[imiric]

How are weather apps still relevant, let alone profitable enough to build a company around? This problem has been solved years ago. All the app needs to do is hook up to one or more data providers, and show some stats and pretty graphs. It's essentially a read-only frontend to an API. There are plenty of options to choose from on every platform, including not using an app at all.

The features this ad promotes all seem like solutions to nonexistent problems. "Alternate possible futures" don't give me any more confidence in the forecast—it just shows that it's not reliable, which everyone should know already. "Community reports" just add another layer of uncertainty. How can I trust that someone's report is valid or up-to-date, or that it applies to my area? Maps are nice and visually interesting, but this is not exactly novel. Notifications? No thanks. A weather app "should be fun"? Huge no thanks. Privacy and trust? Why do you collect any data?? Unbelievable.

[kmbfjr]

You are not wrong, except at scale it gets complicated quickly. For starters, to support large user numbers, you’re going to have to process your own grib2 data for radar and turn them into tiles at zoom levels.

It takes about 24 cores with a GPU to do CONUS, Canada, Alaska, Pacific and Caribbean data. This should be 2x for redundancy. Even being cheap with main processing in my basement (gen power, backup internet) the cloud costs to serve it are $200 month plus data transfer. The standby grib machine spins up should it not see the cheap primary or the NOAAPort receiver is offline.

There is no money to be made without whoring out your user’s privacy. People just won’t pay for a privacy focused weather app. I keep this going as a hobby.

[imiric]

Fair enough. Things are always more complicated at scale.

But then again, we don't know whether this company is maintaining this infra themselves, or if they're paying for API access. Besides, if anything, running their own servers is often the more cost-effective option, so the details you mention might not matter in practice.

My incredulity has more to do with the profitability of this type of software, considering that the free options are good enough for the average person, and that the features promoted in the article are hardly innovative.

> There is no money to be made without whoring out your user’s privacy.

Well, I do object to that. It's certainly possible to sustain a profitable business without selling out your users' data. It may not be as profitable as the advertising model, which is often too enticing for companies to ignore. This company explicitly says that their income comes directly from customers, so apparently I'm underestimating the amount of people who find these features valuable enough to pay for them.

[cryptoz]

> Why do you collect any data??

There are like, billions of internet-connected barometers in the world that are not used in weather models. I don’t know if Acme has any of that in mind, but there is plenty of good reason for a weather app to collect data from phones. I know @counters may disagree with me, but I believe there are opportunities to improve short term forecast accuracy using data collected from phones.

Also, pretty much every day, all the apps and all the sites will tell me the incorrect current conditions at my location, much less the forecast. It’s 2026 damnit. Why doesn’t my phone know what the weather is outside right now?

I haven’t got the app yet, but I plan on it (gotta upgrade iOS first I think). Acme seems to have a lot of ideas I agree with, so, definitely following this.

One more thing. Weather apps have not been “solved”. Not even close. They all suck, there’s billions in untapped opportunity, and a stale existing market of bad solutions. People die all the time from severe weather. There is so much more work to be done in forecast accuracy and communication.

[imiric]

> I believe there are opportunities to improve short term forecast accuracy using data collected from phones.

Alright, fair point. That could be a reasonable use case.

But judging by their advertised "Community reports" feature, Acme doesn't seem to be doing this. And even if they did, this feature should be opt-in, and their privacy policy should only apply for those users.

> Also, pretty much every day, all the apps and all the sites will tell me the incorrect current conditions at my location, much less the forecast. It’s 2026 damnit. Why doesn’t my phone know what the weather is outside right now?

Have you tried looking out the window? What do you need hyper-local and minute-accurate forecasts for? If you need to know accurate current conditions get a thermometer and barometer. If you want it on your smartphone, then the app could show you live readings from your device, without sending the data anywhere.

Weather forecasts have always been an inexact science, and likely always will be. Our models have gotten better over time, and at this point I think that they're good enough. I only need to know the general temperature and likelihood of certain weather events a few days in advance, at most. If there's a chance of rain, I carry an umbrella just in case. If it's going to be cold, I pack a jacket.

Highly accurate weather prediction doesn't solve any practical problem for the average person. Hyping it up like it does only serves as marketing for companies that want to build a profitable business around it.

[imiric]

After thinking more about this, I don't think smartphones would even be good sources of ambient data that could improve forecasts.

Smartphones are personal computers. They spend most of their time in pockets and controlled indoor environments. This ambient data is of no use to anyone, which is why there's still a market for home weather stations, whose sensors are typically placed outside.

[cryptoz]

The barometer data is for sure noisy, and must be cleaned and quality controlled. But that is possible to do, has been for 10 years now (there are published papers and demo apps that can do it). For one, rate of change of atmospheric pressure is pretty much the same inside as out, your main challenge for the raw value to be correct is user elevation. That can be corrected in quality control as well.

Plenty of work has been done on this front, and it can be demonstrated that you can assimilate the smartphone pressures into weather models and get some good results. It is hard, of course, and I’m not sure personally how much better the forecasts get. But it’s absolutely possible.

[counters]

> Weather forecasts have always been an inexact science

Weather forecasting is anything but "an inexact science." It's extremely exact up to the limitations and assumptions you impose on your model due to resource constraints.

And yes - I assume that this is what you mean by "an inexact science." But still in 2026 I regularly meet people who think that weather forecasting is the same as astrology, completely ignorant of massive amount of physical scientific understanding that goes into it.

[imiric]

> Weather forecasting is anything but "an inexact science." It's extremely exact up to the limitations and assumptions you impose on your model due to resource constraints.

It's "extremely exact" but our models are not good enough. So... inexact?

The reality is that we don't have the technology to model the physical world with extreme accuracy. If we did, we would be able to predict the future, and not just weather events. The world's most powerful supercomputers can model atmospheric conditions pretty well, and they've certainly improved over time, but there are still a lot of variables unaccounted for.

This is why I think that ~90% accuracy for a few days in advance[1] is good enough for most people. A smartphone app won't miraculously make this better, no matter how pretty or "fun" it is.

[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/weather-forecasts

[counters]

> It's "extremely exact" but our models are not good enough. So... inexact?

That's not the common way that the phrase "inexact science" is used. All modeling involves approximations at some levels, but you wouldn't turn around and call it "inexact science."

> ... but there are still a lot of variables unaccounted for.

Such as... ?

This is the problem with throwing away colloquialisms like "inexact science." What, specifically, is a "variable" that is unaccounted for that would unlock improved forecast accuracy or to push thresholds closer to the predictability limits?

> This is why I think that ~90% accuracy for a few days in advance[1] is good enough for most people. A smartphone app won't miraculously make this better, no matter how pretty or "fun" it is.

I agree, which is why the other portions of your comment come off poorly.