Wthr is how an app goes wrong

Dan Seitz Contributing Writer, Tech

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There’s a lot I can say about Wthr. But mostly it’s about smokescreens, and how an app goes wrong.

Wthr

Wthr is supposedly an application designed around the ten principles of industrial designer Dieter Rams. What it really is is a shameless attempt to sell a weather app to hipsters by invoking a name they fetishize without understanding. The name, which strips out all the vowels to the point of incomprehensibility, accidentally says it all.

It’s not that Wthr is a bad app, per se. It’s very simple, with the temperature, a dial pointing sunny, cloudy, rainy, and so on. It also has a week’s forecast. The problem is that this isn’t innovative and in fact it isn’t even useful.

This is data we can get anywhere: I believe Wthr pulls its data from Weather Underground, but the point is, it’s not using its own information. This app thinks it’s replacing other “confusing” weather apps but what it’s really trying to replace is a window. Other weather apps are not hard to read: you boot, say, the Weather Channel and it gives you the same information that Wthr does, but also 36-hour, three-day, and ten-day forecasts. And unlike Wthr, that app is free.

It also enables GPS and leaves it on even when you force close the app, so it’s a battery drain to boot.

Again, Wthr is not a bad app for what it is, but it got so wrapped up in its own design that it failed to take into account how people use weather apps. This is not worth the buck simply because you’ll never use it. And that, dear reader, is how an app goes wrong.

Wthr [App Store]