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There are plenty of options when it comes getting local weather reports on your iPhone, including the built-in app that ships with the iPhone.  The problem with most of these applications though is the fact that they do not use the feed from the South African Weather Service, which I’ve found over the years to be the most accurate of them all.  The Weather Service also have a mobile section on the site, which used to be the way that I grabbed weather info off my phone.  Once you’ve found the city you visit most often you could also create a URL shortcut on your home screen to quickly pull up the web page in future.

All this worked fairly well until recently when WeatherSA decided to reduce the free mobile forecast to a 3 day report in stead of the normal 7 days.  While it’s still useful, it’s kind of awkward when you hit Thursday, want to plan the weekend ahead but can only see the forecast up until Saturday.  WeatherSA is now providing the 7 day report (and lots of other maps and charts) at a R5/week subscription, which feels very expensive if you’re only using the service every now and again.

iPhone App

On the mobile page WeatherSA also makes mentions of a free iPhone app called WeatherZA, but again you need the R5/week subscription to use it.  This is where the confusion starts!

I opened the application in iTunes and found that it was in fact not free but going ‘on sale’ for $0.99.  iTunes also makes mentions of the subscription, but the differences of running with or without the R5/week subscription is not clearly specified.  So I decided to buy the app and see for myself

The application has some bugs which I will elaborate on below, but that aside I actually enjoyed the feel.  You’re greeted with a home screen that lists your configured locations, plus brief weather data:

You can then drill into each one individually to get more detailed information:

Paging using the conventional iPhone flick of the thumb will take you through the complete 7 day forecast, complete as you would get it on the WeatherSA website.I particularly like the clickable map which provides good detail for the country as a whole:

So the question is what do you lose when you don’t go for the R5/month deal and just stick to the $0.99 app?  From what I can see the 7 day forecast is still available, but much of the detail is missing:

I find the missing rainfall forecast particularly problematic, and on days that I go cycling I definitely need the wind predictions as well!

Buggy

With an average rating of 2 stars in iTunes this app does not rank amongst users’ favourites.  Biggest gripes are unexpected crashes and paid up users being shown as Unregistered, and hence getting limited information.  I experienced both these issues frequently in my testing and would hope that the developers can fix this in a future release.  The crashes seem to happen mostly when image data is being downloaded.  Some of the images are as big as 80kb, which can be problematic over slow connections.  I definitely got more crashes testing this over cellular data than over LAN.

Privacy

During my testing I noticed that the application phones home to a service called Flurry whenever it starts up.  I picked this up while looking at my proxy server logs.

According to their website:

Flurry Analytics places a lightweight agent into an application, so that performance data are tracked, logged and reported back for analysis. This information is confidential and available only to the developer to analyze in aggregate. Individual user data is not identifiable. Developers are provided a wealth of metrics around usage behavior, any custom event they choose to track and technical information about the device, firmware version, carrier and more.

Analysing the post request in more detail I can see that my unique iPhone identifier is sent up (which means that they can track you across application sessions, but more importantly across applications), plus some application usage data:

I guess this is similar to what Google analytics does for web pages, so not too concerned about it for now.

Verdict

I think this application is a nice start, but would need some more polishing before I would recommend it to others.  The R5/week subscription for the full data feed is way too expensive though and WeatherSA would need to rethink that one if they want mass adoption of this application.