Finally!

Weather support is now live! This is a huge release and it's hard to test all scenarios, so I expect there to be some bugs. Please submit your feedback in this thread (no need to submit new posts)!

Sneak Peak: https://imgur.com/a/w7yluDP

There's also still much left to do with weather, so hang tight!

Weather - What's there now

• Full weather view in the dashboard, where you can horizontally scroll to see the hourly and daily forecasts.
• Ability to toggle between actual temperature and apparent/feels like temperature.
• Weather widgets in small, medium and large. For small and medium widgets, you can choose whether you prefer hourly or daily forecasts. For large widgets, or a 'tall' weather block, it will display both.
• Weather stats in the Stat Bar! Things like sunrise, sunset, high / low temps, humidity, etc, so you can customize the data you want to see.

Weather - What's coming! (aka, what's not there yet)

• A toggle to display more details within the app, so you can see the full weather report.
• A cleaner look for weather if you have a white background (not happy with how it looks now)

These features are already done and just requires an app review. I will submit it ASAP and hopefully it goes through quickly this time.

Don't want weather?

• Since weather requires a subscription, if you don't want weather, you can completely hide it. Go into Settings -> Weather and toggle "Show Weather"

About the price

Right now, the price I settled on is $4.99 for 3 months. I realize this is much higher than what I mentioned very early on during the beta, where I said I was looking at $1 year. That original estimate was based on me misreading the usage limits of a weather API (in fairness, the way it was presented was misleading).

I did a lot of math and modelling to figure out a price point. The strange thing about this is that a lot of weather services have entry point tiers are fairly reasonable, but then they jump from $35 / month to $160 / month.

I can roughly support 150 subscribers, give or take, on the $35 tier. But as soon as I get that one extra subscriber, I have to jump up to the $160 tier. So I have to price it at a point where I don't get punished for getting more subscribers!

I'll continue to evaluate things as I learn more about different services and what the number of subscribers look like.

This is a good read if you are curious: The Plight of Indie Weather App Developers!

Where's the data from?

I am using WeatherBit. They gather weather data from over 45,000 weather stations across the globe and support more than 376,000 cities.

You can check out the weather forecast for your region here on their website.

What was the problem? What took so long?

Honestly, I have no idea. First the App Review team had concerns with how the subscription prompt was presented, which I fixed based on their notes and resubmitted.

The hold-up started when there was concern about Widget Wizard's use of the HealthKit data. There seemed to be an assumption that to use HealthKit, your app had to be DEDICATED to health and fitness, whereas the App Review Guidelines just said you had to use HealthKit for health and fitness functionality (aka, don't harvest/sell health data, which Widget Wizard doesn't do).

There was a note somewhere in the documentation that the app must be "primarily designed to provide health or fitness services", which I believe is where the confusion stemmed from (primary doesn't mean dedicated!). I've been chatting with the developer of Widgy, and he had to remove Health integration to get his app approved.

It took a lot of waiting, rejections and back and forth. I submitted an appeal on Monday and the app got approved on Tuesday. Of course, since this was the day of Apple's iPhone announcement, Apple's servers were hammered it took a loooooong time before the update showed up!