How to Make a Weather App

On the other hand, if all apps use one of the same 5-10 APIs to get weather conditions, do we need more of them? The Guardian reports, that there are over 8 000 mobile applications with the word “weather” in the title for Android and over 2 400 for iOS.

The key here is your UVP — unique value point which you have to come up with. It can be either targeting a specific audience or providing some features that let you stand out from competitors.

But before we share our tips & hints on building a weather application, let’s find out for whom it’s reasonable to develop such a product.

👨‍💼 Weather App Development: Interested Parties

To be honest, weather apps aren’t popular among startups (despite there are some great success stories) since they’re quite difficult to monetize.

However, there are many other potential stakeholders who can get significant benefits in form of customer loyalty, increased engagement, reach and retention rate, you name it. So, it’s reasonable to develop a weather app if you are…

Online Media Publisher 📰

The first group of potential stakeholders includes local and county news networks, TV stations, radio broadcasting centers and so on. Take the BBC Weather app or Waff’s 48 First Alert Weather App as an example.

“There’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes”, they say. However, a weather app, developed by a local authority, can be useful in many ways:

1. Obviously, it’s a weather app, so it will be used by locals to get fast and accurate weather broadcasts.
2. You can and should pay special attention to weather-related risks. If you’re from California and the coming week is going to be windy and hotter than hell, remind your users that they should be super careful with fire and postpone hiking activities, for example.
3. Additionally, we can develop an emergency management block for you, which will help users prepare for disasters (we’ll talk about it more in the paragraph about features).
4. You can also use the app as another source to distribute important alerts and local news since modern people are more often on their smartphones than anywhere else.
5. Finally, it’s a great way to show how much you care about the local population and reduce possible risks and damage caused by the natural disasters. Good for your social brand? Definitely.

⚙️ Where to Get Weather Data: Top 5 APIs to Consider

But no matter who you are — an online media publisher, a travel agency or a local authority — you can’t develop a weather app without a good prediction system.

The good news is that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. There are many available APIs — you just have to choose the most appropriate one. How? That’s what we’re about to tell!

The second option will definitely provide a better UX. However, you’ll need user’s permission to share his location data with you. In the light of the last events regarding digital privacy, make sure you don’t violate the GDPR or any similar regulations in the country of operation.

📋 What Features Should Be In My Brand's Weather App?

We’ve just found out how to integrate the heart of your app — the forecasting system. Yet, the visual side of the application doesn’t mean less for your users. In this paragraph, we will discuss how you can arrange weather data in a user-friendly way and provide more value to your audience.

Reminder: we can integrate the described below features into your existing application, if you already have one and want to improve it with a weather module.

# 1: Current Weather & Forecasts

The most used screen within your application is definitely the one with the current weather forecast. Therefore, it requires ultimate attention.

💰 Cost to Build a Weather App

Considering that such projects usually aren't diffcult ones, the cost to build a weather app isn't very high:

To calculate the approximate costs we used the average rate of $40/hour. To provide you with the exact cost to build a weather app, share the details of your project with us. After that we'll be able to provide you with more accurate estimate.

💡 Conclusion

Weather app development doesn’t require many resources but can bring you many indirect benefits to your business or citizens.

Yet, if you want everything to work smoothly, we’d recommend you to find a remote development team. Why remote? Cause this task isn’t that difficult and doesn’t require building an in-house dev department which, by the way, is more time- and effort-consuming than challenging a mobile agency.

We at Stormotion would love to help you with your Weather Development Project. Challenge us and let’s change the world together!