The Hello Weather Report, Summer 2020 Edition
Hello, weather friends! It’s been a minute since we shared an update, so I thought we should post up some fresh vibes and future plans.
NEW ANDROID UPDATES
This week we released a big update to our Android app, adding bonus forecast info, the new ClimaCell data source (more on that below), additional weather units, Fahrenheit and Celsius mode, and improved dark mode support. We refreshed the app’s look and feel too, and improved lots of things under the hood.
We also added a new $0.99/month subscription option, and bumped our yearly subscription by a buck, to $5.99/year.
Hop over to the Play Store and grab the update, it's a good one! Three cheers to Dan for cranking out a lot of great work on this.
CLIMACELL
As we mentioned a while ago, we’ve been on the hunt for new forecast data providers since Dark Sky will be going kaput. ClimaCell is a great replacement, because it offers the same real-time hyperlocal precipitation estimates, and it has better international coverage than Dark Sky.
ClimaCell is available in our iOS and Android apps right now.
(BTW, this is just our first pass with adding new sources. We’ll probably add at least one more, but we're still evaluating which ones to include.)
iOS 14 & GENERAL MORALE UPDATE
We've been hard at work trying to get our apps ready for iOS 14/watchOS 7, and it’s been a rocky road so far. We're aiming to have some new widgets released around the time that iOS 14 comes out, but we’re still working through stability issues and deprecations that have affected the app, so we don't have a firm ETA or beta version yet.
The overall vibe of developing iOS apps isn’t feeling super great right now. In fact, we’ve been pretty stressed out about it.
If you’d like to read more inside baseball about how things are going, you can check out my recent Twitter rant or listen in on the DevNews podcast.
We're considering releasing a new book series on the challenges of developing an independent mobile app business:
OTHER RECENT TIDBITS
- We passed 500,000 total downloads for this lil app! Dang! It’s wonderful to see how far it’s gone all around the world. Thank you so much for your amazing support.
- We joined the Indie Sticker Pack fundraiser, which was a fun experiment and raised about $10,000 for good causes.
- We started looking into advertising ideas, but got overwhelmed by KPIs and CPIs and WTFs. If we can eventually figure it out, you might see a Hello Weather ad somewhere in the world.
That’s all for now. Stay safe and cool out there.
✌️❤️