Meet Wayther, an iOS weather forecast app designed specifically for road trips

by with No Comment Tech

Image Credits: Wayther

A new iOS app called Wayther wants to help you better plan your road trips by giving you real-time road conditions and weather forecasts along your route. Created by indie developer Axel Le Pennec, Wayther gives you weather forecasts along your route up to 10 days in advance. 

Le Pennec, who has been building iOS apps since 2013, told TechCrunch that he came up with the idea for Wayther after adding a weather forecasts feature for his digital boating log book app, Skipper. 

“In addition to having the ability to record a boat trip in Skipper, I also wanted to add a new feature that would allow users to plan a future trip and check the weather along the route,” Le Pennec said. “I realized that it was a nice feature for the app, but maybe it was also an idea for another app that could be used by more users like truckers or travelers.” 

Le Pennec then decided to create Wayther.

Image Credits: Wayther

Wayther lets you pick different routes and adjust your departure or arrival times to find the perfect window for a safe and fun trip. The idea behind the app is to get rid of the need to type multiple locations into a weather app when planning a road trip and trying to determine when potentially bad weather might hit. 

You can identify severe weather alerts, poor visibility and night driving conditions. Plus, you can plan out your trip during scenic times like sunrise or sunset. 

Once you enter your starting point and destination into the app, it will give you three routes from which to choose. Wayther then gives you detailed weather forecasts at different points along your route. The app’s interactive map will show you a trip overview and detailed timeline. 

The app works in all countries where Apple Weather is available and supports both metric and imperial units. Wayther isn’t just aimed at car trips, as it can also be used for motorcycles, RVs, trucks, buses and bikes too. 

Image Credits: Wayther

Le Pennec told TechCrunch that this is just the first version of the app, and that he has a slew of features planned, such as the ability to add stops, view route history, save favorites and see live updates while driving. Le Pennec is also waiting on authorization from Apple to build a CarPlay app, and is also working to add better OS integration with widgets, Live Activity and Siri shortcuts. 

In addition, Le Pennec wants to make the app available in more languages, starting with French, German, Spanish and Italian. 

Wayther offers a free trial that gives three trips for free. After the trial period, you can choose from $1.99 weekly, $2.99 monthly or $14.99 yearly plans.

Meet Wayther, an iOS weather forecast app designed specifically for road trips

by with No Comment Tech

Image Credits: Wayther

A new iOS app called Wayther wants to help you better plan your road trips by giving you real-time road conditions and weather forecasts along your route. Created by indie developer Axel Le Pennec, Wayther gives you weather forecasts along your route up to 10 days in advance. 

Le Pennec, who has been building iOS apps since 2013, told TechCrunch that he came up with the idea for Wayther after adding a weather forecasts feature for his digital boating log book app, Skipper. 

“In addition to having the ability to record a boat trip in Skipper, I also wanted to add a new feature that would allow users to plan a future trip and check the weather along the route,” Le Pennec said. “I realized that it was a nice feature for the app, but maybe it was also an idea for another app that could be used by more users like truckers or travelers.” 

Le Pennec then decided to create Wayther.

Image Credits: Wayther

Wayther lets you pick different routes and adjust your departure or arrival times to find the perfect window for a safe and fun trip. The idea behind the app is to get rid of the need to type multiple locations into a weather app when planning a road trip and trying to determine when potentially bad weather might hit. 

You can identify severe weather alerts, poor visibility and night driving conditions. Plus, you can plan out your trip during scenic times like sunrise or sunset. 

Once you enter your starting point and destination into the app, it will give you three routes from which to choose. Wayther then gives you detailed weather forecasts at different points along your route. The app’s interactive map will show you a trip overview and detailed timeline. 

The app works in all countries where Apple Weather is available and supports both metric and imperial units. Wayther isn’t just aimed at car trips, as it can also be used for motorcycles, RVs, trucks, buses and bikes too. 

Image Credits: Wayther

Le Pennec told TechCrunch that this is just the first version of the app, and that he has a slew of features planned, such as the ability to add stops, view route history, save favorites and see live updates while driving. Le Pennec is also waiting on authorization from Apple to build a CarPlay app, and is also working to add better OS integration with widgets, Live Activity and Siri shortcuts. 

In addition, Le Pennec wants to make the app available in more languages, starting with French, German, Spanish and Italian. 

Wayther offers a free trial that gives three trips for free. After the trial period, you can choose from $1.99 weekly, $2.99 monthly or $14.99 yearly plans.

Can blockchain make weather forecasts better? WeatherXM thinks so

by with No Comment Tech

WeatherXM, startups, venture capital

Image Credits: Getty Images

Accurate weather forecasts are critical to industries like agriculture, and they’re also important to help prevent and mitigate harm from inclement weather events or natural disasters. But getting forecasts right is extremely difficult. That’s why the founders of WeatherXM have been looking to make weather forecasts more accurate for the past 12 years.

In 2012, Manolis Nikiforakis, Stratos Theodorou and Nikos Tsiligaridis launched an app that allowed community members to provide grassroots weather updates. They then worked as consultants to enterprise customers, like the Athens airport, in weather-sensitive industries. Now, they are building WeatherXM, a network of community-monitored weather stations that are collecting and sharing local weather data through systems built on the blockchain.

Nikiforakis, WeatherXM’s CEO, told TechCrunch that the startup has already deployed 5,000 of its own weather stations in over 80 countries. These stations collect local ground weather information and are monitored by volunteers that are compensated with WeatherXM’s own crypto token, $WXM. All of the data collected is accessible to anyone to use personally for free with paid offerings for enterprises that want to use it commercially.

“We are strong advocates of open source,” Nikiforakis said. “We believe [WeatherXM’s mission] is not purposeful without collaboration with multiple different sides of people and expertise. We are making all this data openly available to anyone. You can see in real time what every weather station is reporting.”

The startup just raised a $7.7 million Series A round led by Faction, an early-stage blockchain-focused fund that is affiliated with Lightspeed, with participation from VCs including Borderless Capital, Alumni Ventures and Red Beard Ventures, in addition to more VCs and other types of investors. The startup will use the capital to expand its team and set itself up to start monetizing its commercial users.

Tim Khoury, a partner at Faction, said he was drawn to invest in the company because it offered an attractive use case for a community-driven blockchain project that had both the supply of people willing to join the community and the demand for what the company was producing. The potential TAM for more accurate weather data didn’t hurt, either.

“The falling of a lot of deep networks is the demand side,” Khoury said. “If there isn’t demand for what is actually being generated, or produced, in this case, you can’t sustain the network over time.”

As someone with a basement that has flooded on multiple occasions during storms that weren’t accurately predicted, this deal immediately piqued my interest. But the blockchain and crypto token aspect of WeatherXM’s strategy confused me initially.

Nikiforakis told me that the crypto incentive structure is the only way this local weather network could work. Paying each person who oversees a weather station would make the idea too costly and complicated to scale to the size the network needs to reach to be effective. He said via their first app, they discovered that people were willing to provide weather data for free, so WeatherXM’s structure is meant to incentivize users just a bit more.

“[Using crypto] also helps coordinate that [weather stations] are deployed in the areas where we care about the most, developing nations and rural nations,” Nikiforakis said. “The crypto rewards work as a coordination tool. In many ways this is a community project, therefore that crypto is acting as a governance tool. People can vote using this token on decisions that influence how the project works.”

While I’ll admit I’m not bullish when it comes to blockchain or crypto, utilizing that structure here does make a lot of sense. It’s also complementary to the startup’s focus on making the data open source, which requires blockchain technology to actually be effective.

I was moderating a panel earlier this week that was focused on how communities can prepare for climate emergencies and disasters, and one thing that came up on multiple occasions was that data like this needed to be open source so that public and private entities could more easily work together to both plan for climate disasters and better respond to them.

WeatherXM making all the data open source, especially from its stations in underserved or rural areas, could be advantageous to communities that are fighting the growing threat and damage of climate events without needing a large budget or resources.

The mission here is easy to get behind, but we’ll see whether bringing weather to the blockchain gets enough demand to really make a difference.

“We need to create an ecosystem around our technology and ideas for the industry to move forward, for meteorology to improve in general,” Nikiforakis said. “We don’t like the old way where things are happening in silos and not giving access to anyone who has the credentials or payment. We are going against the stream. We are opening the data to everyone.”

image of Weather Up widget on Home Screen and on Apple Watch

Weather Up puts a fully interactive weather app into an iOS widget

by with No Comment Tech

image of Weather Up widget on Home Screen and on Apple Watch

Image Credits: Weather Up

A new weather app, Weather Up 3.0, launching today, is pushing the boundaries of what iOS 17’s interactive widgets are capable of. The app is introducing fully interactive widgets, where you can tap on the forecast displayed on the widget to see more details about current conditions or the days ahead. The idea, explains developer David Barnard, is to “put a whole weather app in a widget.”

Barnard, a self-described “weather nerd” and developer of the iOS Home Screen customization app Launch Center Pro, has been dabbling with Weather Up as a side project on nights and weekends, along with another independent developer Brock Batsell, while still working his day job as a growth advocate at subscription management startup RevenueCat.

Initially, the plan was to develop an Apple Watch complication where you could view the weather at a glance, but when Apple debuted widget support, the plan pivoted. Then, just as they were nearing plans to launch their first widgets, Apple announced that widgets would be interactive in iOS 17. So they shifted things once again to dive into the new functionality.

“This is the nice part about it being a side hustle,” remarked Barnard. “I’m able to postpone these kinds of launches and do really cool stuff and tinker.” That’s something that wouldn’t necessarily be possible if the app was his main business, responsible for paying his bills, or was venture-backed by investors expecting a return.

The result of those efforts is a clever and unique way to engage with the weather and forecast on your iPhone.

Image Credits: Weather Up

With the new widget, you can view the next four days’ forecast, including conditions like rain. If there’s rain, you can tap on the rain forecast and it will expand to give you the 60-minute view of what’s ahead, so you can see when the rain is expected to end. You can also tap on any day on the widget and will zoom into the hourly conditions. Plus, on hourly and daily forecasts, you can tap a little arrow to advance through time. That way you can tell if the soccer game this weekend will be rained out or if it will be sunny, for example.

Barnard credits the idea for the arrow to advance ahead in the forecast to Tucker MacDonald, the developer of the Tide Guide app, who also helped answer technical questions about its implementation.

Image Credits: Weather Up

By default, Weather Up’s forecast source is Apple’s Weather — the service that used to be Dark Sky ahead of Apple’s acquisition. Barnard says Apple has made several improvements to the service since then and it’s now the most reliable for the majority of users. However, because other weather services might be more accurate in particular locations and markets, there’s an option to switch the app and widget to use AerisWeather or AccuWeather instead. (Or, as Barnard does, you could put three widgets on your iPhone’s Home Screen, each tied to a different source to see which is most accurate for you!)

Building a fully interactive weather widget was no small task, we’re told.

“These APIs just came out with iOS 17, so they are very new,” Barnard explains. “There’s bugs to work around. And it’s a challenge because not many people have been exploring at this depth.” That means when the developers came across a bug, there wasn’t much information posted online about what to do or how to work around it. Plus, Apple places restrictions on interactive widgets that limit how frequently they can update.

However, Batsell was able to add logic that allows the widget to update at least every 15 minutes, if not more frequently — an “incredible feat,” says Barnard, given Apple’s system restrictions. In addition, whenever the user interacts with the widget, those built-in restrictions are lifted and the widget can refresh its data again.

Image Credits: Weather Up

While the widget itself provides enough forecast and weather information that you may not need to ever launch the app, it won’t have all the details. More specific data, like humidity, wind, cloud cover, and the “feels like” temperature, as well as radar maps, are found inside the app itself.

Finally, because weather data is not free, the app is available at a $4 per month or $40 per year subscription price. (And yes, that’s $40 even — Weather Up is taking advantage of Apple’s new pricing that allows developers to no longer have to end their price points at $.99.) Naturally, Weather Up is also leveraging RevenueCat’s subscription management API — and Barnard hopes to use the app later as a case study showcasing its benefits.

Weather Up is available for download on iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and as an iMessage app.