Last week, we clarified our official stance on the weather. This week, we’re sharing our official stance on the weather app.
It should be better.
The iPhone weather app has improved in recent years. Specifically, they switched from just showing the rain emoji whenever there was at least a 30% chance of rain on a day to including the probability of precipitation below that emoji. This was a massive improvement that has revolutionized my dog’s daycare schedule.
Still, it’s missing something useful. If you click into a given day, it doesn’t tell you when it’s likely and unlikely to rain. It tells you how much rain you’re going to get at any time.
I am not a gardener. I am not a major league groundskeeper. I am not a fish in an arroyo. I don’t need to know how much rain we’re going to get. I need to know what times it might rain, and I’d like to know how likely it is to rain at those times. Instead, I’m being told with misleading certainty via a poorly-marked graph that we’ll get 0.1 inches of rain between 10 PM and 11 PM on Friday. Look at this shit:
Apple, you have visibility, pressure, and heat index on your app. You can’t tell me the rough hourly likelihood of rain?
