Case Study - WeatherKit is a beautiful, design-oriented weather app for iOS.

Overview

Started as an experiment to build something unique in the iOS app weather market, we kicked off by doing a deep dive into the existing apps and their shortcomings. We found that most apps were either too complex or too simple, and none of them were designed to be used on a daily basis. We set out to build a weather app that was both beautiful and functional.

Design specs

WeatherKit is a gesture-based weather app. During the initial iterative loop with some early-adopters, we found that a mechanism that let's you switch the context via a simple swipe could eventually pay off — and it did. Because of this, our precise weather app was featured by Apple on the AppStore, covered in international media and has become a staple in the weather app market. We can't wait to share the next big step in WeatherKit's journey with all of you. Another big talking point was the user privacy, as we knew that there's no reason why a simple weather app should sell your private location data.

Development tidbits

What we set out to build had no precedent, so most functionality had to be built from scratch. We ended up with a bit of complexity that we now regret, such as building our own RainAlert engine - to send you a notification when it's about to rain. At some point, we deviated and wanted to ship our own API, similar to DarkSky, but never got around to making that public. The current WeatherKit 3 iOS app has been developed with UIKit, CoreData, Swift 5 and it works with no database, as we're not storing any user data.

What we did