Why You Can Trust CNET Yahoo Weather review: Pretty, with lots of extras
With an elegant interface, weather information, and interactive maps, Yahoo Weather is a must-have for weather watchers everywhere.
Editors' note: This review has been updated with the release of the Android version, August 8, 2013.
Yahoo Weather
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
Yahoo Weather (iOS|Android) is a weather app that displays stunning Flickr photos as a backdrop to a wide range of weather information on your phone. There are certainly other options with more weather information, but for a quick look at what's happening in your area, Yahoo Weather is a good-looking and well-made app.
When you launch Yahoo Weather, you'll be asked immediately if the app can use your location so it can give you information on the weather around your area. From there you'll be presented with a photo from your area via Flickr, and the app takes into account what time of day it is to give you an image that matches your current time. In the lower left of the screen you get the current outlook (such as "Partly cloudy"), the high and low temperature for the day, and the current temperature.
As you swipe to scroll down farther, you're presented with much more information. You get a forecast for each hour of the current day followed by a forecast for the week. There's a written forecast of the rest of the day's weather and what it will be like tomorrow. Below that you have a map you can touch to go full-screen, with buttons for interactive radar, satellite, heat, and wind maps. Below the map are listed percentage of precipitation, wind speed, barometric pressure, and today's times when the sun rises and sets. These sections are in modules so you can touch and hold a small tab and then drag them around to bring the ones you check most often to the top if you desire.
Yahoo Weather is great for getting a quick glance at the weather in your city, but you also can add other cities to find out the current weather there. Simply touch the plus sign in the upper right to add another city by name or by ZIP code. The new city will have a Flickr photo from that area along with all the weather information mentioned above. With a few cities entered, you can swipe left or right to quickly switch areas and see the weather outlook for those locations.
What is striking about the app is how elegantly all the information is laid out. It certainly doesn't hurt that the backdrop for each forecast is a beautiful photo from Flickr, but even the overlays of information look great, with white text and dividing lines between modules, along with simple animations for wind speed and sun and moon. The overall feel of the app is that it's not trying to bombard you with weather data; it simply gives you the information you'll want to check out daily.
I had only one minor problem as I tested this app. While it is great-looking, with other weather apps you get the current temperature and forecast all on one screen, whereas it requires an extra step in Yahoo Weather to see this information. It might not seem like a big deal, but if you just want to take a quick glance, there are other apps out there that give you everything at once.
Still, the Yahoo Weather app is an excellent way to see all the basic weather information for the cities you care about along with a few useful extras. If you appreciate good photography and want a well-laid-out interface for tracking weather, Yahoo Weather is a very solid choice.