Google Weather should really be its own app

Abner Li | Nov 28 2023 - 2:00 pm PT

Google did a pretty good job redesigning the Weather experience on Android. It’s modern and has a straightforward layout that shows what’s coming up in the next few hours and days all on one screen.

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When you do scroll or select a day, digestible cards note wind, humidity, UV index, precipitation, and more. Meanwhile, Google has kept around the lovable “Froggy” with different backgrounds that reflect the current condition to add a bit of whimsy. It really does keep the app fresh.

Helping power 12-hour precipitation forecasts is a deep learning model called MetNet-3 from Google Research and DeepMind that has so far been on par with Apple Weather/Dark Sky in my testing.

This updated Weather experience is currently available on Pixel, but it will presumably expand to all Android devices going forward.

Before the October rollout to Pixel, the last update to Google Weather came in September of 2021. That redesign used Google’s previous Material Theme design language just as Material You was going live in other apps. It’s embarrassing that it took that long to modernize.

Looking forward, I really hope Google has a feature roadmap in place rather than Weather entering maintenance mode until it’s time for the next refresh. An obvious thing to add next is radar and more widgets to show hourly and multi-day forecasts in a 5×1 size. A broader thing Google could do is bring weather to more first-party apps. It’s already starting to do this with Clocks and Contacts, but I think adding it to Google Calendar with a direct link to the full experience would be very interesting and could help people schedule their days.

One thing that could help with that is separating the fullscreen Weather experience out of Google Search and making it a standalone application. For a long time now, it has been part of the Google app.

The reason behind this is presumably because Google views weather as an extension of Search’s knowledge and information purview. The search engine has a rich experience on the web, as well as the Google app on iOS, which also uses MetNet-3. However, that’s not enough, and I think you need to give people a simple app icon that’s ideally preloaded onto every Android device. Given how good Apple’s Weather app is on iOS, Google really should have a 1:1 competitor.

At the very least, Google needs to drop the Pixel exclusivity for the two widgets available today, as that would make for a much more prominent way to launch weather than the homescreen shortcut that’s badged with the Google icon in the corner.