I may have a weather app problem.

I love weather.

More specifically, I love tracking and following and looking at weather. I’m terrible at math and have a beginner’s level skill set in meteorology with terms and reading charts, but in general it just fascinates me. Even though in Florida, we basically have 9 months of heat, humidity and rain and the weather doesn’t change that much day to day, checking the weather for updates is something I do multiple times a day, just for fun.

But it’s not just the stock Weather app on my phone. Oh no, it’s way more than that. As of the time of this post, I have 6 separate weather apps on my phone, not counting said stock Weather app.

  • CARROT - The OG all-in-one weather app. Customizable layouts and data sources, tiles and display screens, radar and rain tracking notifications, not to mention some built in snark, I’ve been a subscriber for almost 10 years now and it’s my #1 go to.

  • Hello Weather - Built by a small team, this one is a favorite because unlike most of the crap in the app store weather category, they don’t track you or any personal information. They rely on The Weather Channel (now there’s an app that tracks you) for their forecast data, which is usually the most accurate, and have a super clean and friendly user interface. Their radar is also my favorite of the bunch.

  • Ambient Weather Network - This is the app I use to pull up the data from my weather station and see super hyper local weather through the network of other weather stations. Oh yeah, I also have a weather station.

  • Acme Weather - From the original creators of Dark Sky (RIP), the hands down best weather app till Apple bought them and shut it down. Acme Weather works really well because it compares sources on the fly for you to give you a graph of predicted weather outcomes. Like, this source says it will rain in 10 minutes, this one in 15, etc and offers a lot of the same advanced forecasting that CARROT does.

  • Ventusky - All radar, all the time. Rain, lightning strikes, wind patterns, cloud cover, and so much more, if I want detailed radar, Ventusky has it. I don’t use any of their other forecasting features really but scrobbling through that detailed lightning strike path is so satisfying.

  • My Hurricane Tracker Pro - I live in Florida and hurricanes happen. While this is mostly a reskinned version of the National Weather Service’s hurricane forecasts, I’ve found that all of the other apps above just do “ok” with tracking major storms, whereas this one gives you straightforward info and a good map tracking system. So something dedicated to just hurricanes is incredibly useful.

Now you might be thinking “Why do you need all of these apps??” and the truth is, they all do one or two things just right and better than the others. That may seem odd given that they basically all pull from the same data available, but truthfully there is a huge difference between Accuweather and The Weather Channel and Foreca and Tomorrow.io and all of their forecasts, as it all depends on where exactly you are. I live in a large metro area so we have pretty good forecasts. But when I travel, I have found that it varies from place to place in terms of which forecast is better. So it makes sense to have all of these (ok maybe not all of them) in my back pocket “just in case” and again, it’s fun to look at weather and compare things!

With the exception of Ambient Weather, none of these apps are free, either requiring an annual subscription or a one time purchase. And I’m happy to give it because guess what? Weather forecasts run off of satelites and satelites (and the time to process their output) is expensive! Bu the other plus side to paying for them is that they don’t track you. All of the free apps have terrible privacy policies - some of the biggest apps that track and sell your location data, are weather apps. So if you want good, accurate forecasts and a little bit more privacy on the side, it’s worth paying up for. I’m not going to be a meteorologist any time soon, so I’m not ponying up for something that is hundreds of dollars a year, but spending about $80 a year on all of these apps as a way to feed my hobby? I’m ok with that.