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WeatherMaster, Open Source, and the Future of Android; An Interview with Pranshul
(gardinerbryant.com)
this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2026
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Technology
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From the screenshots this doesn't look too different to Breezy Weather, which I've been using for a while now.
Does anyone know how they compare?
According to the article, it's aimed to mimic Google's Weather app, so I would expect them to be very similar to Breezy.
The thing I'm looking for in a weather app right now is more reliable data. There was a pretty big storm last night that Open-Meteo completely missed.
Strongly agree. You can dress up the interface in all kinds of ways, but if the data being presented isn't good the rest of it doesn't matter.
For a long time the data from Weather Underground was the gold standard. Then IBM bought them, made the data an expensive subscription, and effectively killed it for non-corporate users.
Then Dark Sky broke new ground with hyper-local weather reporting. Which was great until Apple bought them, killed the Android app, and made it exclusively available to iPhone users.
The best source of free data that is still available in the US is still the National Weather Service. Unfortunately the quality has been degraded by massive budget cuts while whole sections of the API have been taken away.
Finding a high quality data source at a reasonable price has become almost impossible.
I still use WU to this day as it's the most accurate and informative weather app in my experience, and the subscription to remove ads is $2.18 CAD per year. Is that expensive or have I misunderstood? It has been worth it to me by comparison to other options, and it is only to remove ads (though I haven't experienced the free version in almost a decade).
IBM sold The Weather Company to a private equity firm in 2024 and it has been operating independently ever since.
My experience was actually with the APIs and not with the main app. They originally allowed free access to the API for individuals, with registration, and a lot of excellent third-party apps let you enter your API to use them. When IBM purchased it, they priced the use of the APIs so that there was no option that made sense for individuals. If you weren't using it in volume, and paying tens of thousands of dollars a year, you were just out of luck.
I hadn't heard that IBM sold it off. I will have to go back and look at the original app. I had thought it also went through a big price jump, but that may have settled out in the meantime. It's been a while now.