I tested over 20 iPhone weather apps for a month. These eight are worth your time.

Your iPhone already has a weather app built in, and it’s actually pretty good. Apple gave it a massive overhaul with iOS 16 back in 2022, folding in a lot of what made Dark Sky, previously one of the best weather apps, a fan favorite. Apple acquired Dark Sky in 2020 and went on to shut it down, but its DNA lives on in Apple’s own app.

However, “pretty good” isn’t the same as “the best,” and the App Store is packed with alternatives that outdo it in one way or another, whether that’s sharper accuracy, deeper customization, or just enough personality to make checking the forecast fun. I tested more than 20 of the most popular weather apps on iOS, and these are the ones I think are worth downloading.

TL;DR: Carrot Weather wins overall, the rest boils down to personal preference

Carrot Weather earns the top spot for a mix of reasons that add up to more than any single feature can. It pulls from multiple data sources instead of locking you into one, the widgets are the most customizable on iOS, and its Apple Watch complications are some of the best around.

It also plugs into Live Activities, meaning real-time updates show up right on your Lock Screen. Then there’s the configurable personality that turns a routine forecast check into something you actually enjoy. No other app on this list balances that much substance with that much character.

Which other app earns a spot on your phone depends on what you’re after. Want the most accurate forecast? Foreca is what you need. It’s the data source Carrot and several other apps pull from, which says a lot in itself. Planning something days out? AccuWeather’s extended forecast stretches a full 90 days. Want to know exactly when it’ll start raining? Its MinuteCast feature nails that down to the minute, a level of precision most competitors don’t offer.

Want something dependable without picking a specialty? The Weather Channel covers the basics thoroughly, with severe weather alerts, pollen, air quality, and extended outlook all in one place. And if you’d rather track a storm on a live map than read about it, Ventusky is built specifically for that. That covers the highlights. Here’s the full breakdown of all the top eight weather apps, plus a few others worth knowing about.

Best iPhone weather apps compared

Carrot Weather

What sets Carrot Weather apart from every other app on this list is personality, and the app commits to that idea in ways that go beyond the forecast itself. You can dial the tone anywhere from professional to fully unhinged, and the running commentary changes accordingly.

A dedicated Carrot tab houses the rest of the personality features, an AI chatbot you can message directly, plus a lighthearted mini-game where you praise, charge, or “debug” Carrot just to see how it reacts. Achievements also live here, tracking your progress as you use the app over time. Even the ads play along. Instead of real promos, you get fake placements for made-up apps and products.

Free users get core forecasting at no cost, current conditions, an hourly forecast, and a daily outlook, plus the app’s trademark commentary. The features that make Carrot a genuine top pick mostly live behind a subscription, though. Radar is one of them, and so are notifications, including precipitation alerts, severe weather warnings, and lightning strikes, none of which come free. The highly customizable widgets and Apple Watch complications are also Premium-only, along with alternate data sources beyond Carrot’s default Foreca feed and deeper app customization options.

Pricing comes in three levels. Premium runs $4.99 monthly or $19.99 yearly. Premium Ultra costs $9.99 monthly or $39.99 yearly. A Family plan covering up to five people runs $14.99 monthly or $59.99 yearly.

Foreca

Foreca markets itself as the most accurate weather provider globally for rain forecasting, and it’s probably the reason why Carrot Weather uses it as its own default data source. So if it’s accuracy that you’re after, this is the one to get. Just know that you won’t get as much visual polish as Carrot. This is a data-dense app first, and it leans hard into that identity by letting you customize exactly which parameters show up on screen rather than trying to make the default view pretty.

That tradeoff is worth it for one big reason. Unlike most competitors, Foreca doesn’t gate its Premium features behind a paywall. All features, including radar with next-few-hours forecasting, government weather warnings, minute-by-minute precipitation, rain notifications, and pollen data, are available for free with ads.

The app has some noteworthy features, such as weather observation history, which lets you look back at past conditions. You also get a capable Apple Watch app, with radar, current conditions, and hourly and daily forecasts, plus multiple complications for your watch face.

If you’re coming from a more minimalistic weather app, the information density will take some getting used to, but if raw accuracy without a paywall is all you need, Foreca delivers on that promise. And if you don’t like the ads, you can get rid of them for just $1.59 quarterly or $4.99 yearly.

AccuWeather

AccuWeather built its reputation on one standout feature, MinuteCast, which delivers precipitation timing down to the minute rather than a general hourly estimate. For anyone who needs to know exactly when rain will start or stop, that precision sets it apart from most competitors.

Beyond MinuteCast, the app packs in allergy tracking, air quality readings, sunrise and sunset data, a 90-day extended forecast, and WinterCast, a detailed snow and ice prediction tool that estimates minimum and maximum accumulation for a given storm.

Using the free version day to day is where the experience wears thin. Full-screen ads interrupt often enough to get annoying, and even the static placements are aggressive, with some eating up nearly half the screen. The interface hasn’t kept pace visually either, and next to newer, cleaner apps on this list, AccuWeather looks noticeably dated.

A Premium subscription clears the ads for $1.99 monthly or $12.99 yearly, while Premium+ adds longer-range forecasts and more advanced severe weather alerts for $4.99 monthly or $29.99 yearly. It’s a bit steep for what’s on offer, and you’d be better off sticking with Carrot Weather, even if you’re willing to pay for a subscription.

The Weather Channel

The Weather Channel starts with the basics done well. It pulls your location and serves up hourly forecasts alongside a 15-day extended outlook, so you’re covered whether you’re planning for tomorrow or next week. Live Doppler radar and storm tracking help you stay ahead of severe weather, and the free tier also includes pollen counts, UV index, and air quality tracking.

Two parts of the app stand out beyond straightforward forecasting. The Today page gives you access to relevant information in one place, including current conditions and the day’s outlook, along with trending videos and weather news, so you’re not hunting across tabs to get the full picture. The Explore page goes further, surfacing useful videos on storms and seasonal weather worth watching if you want to know more.

If the ads or the shorter forecast window bother you, Premium runs $4.99 monthly or $29.99 yearly after a 7-day free trial, which removes ads and adds an 8-day hourly forecast, 15-minute precipitation detail, a 72-hour future radar, air travel weather updates, and probabilistic snowfall predictions.

Subscribers also unlock Premium Perks, which include discounted access to partner services like Spotify and golf tracking, along with offers on outdoor gear brands.

Mercury Weather

Mercury Weather pairs an attractive interface with the kind of practical detail that keeps you coming back. Its gradient-based design and animated backgrounds set it apart visually, but the Trip Forecast feature is what helps it stand out. It automatically folds your upcoming travel destination’s weather into your daily view once a trip gets close, which can come in handy while packing and planning daily activities.

Foreca powers Mercury’s forecasts as the default dynamic source for most locations worldwide, even for free users, with Apple Weather and OpenWeather available as alternatives. Hurricane tracking lets you follow a specific storm or monitor the nearest one in a given basin, and if you’re near the coast, 48-hour tide forecasts and a radar map round out the practical side. A 24-hour UV forecast and air quality alerts add useful daily detail without extra digging. On your Apple Watch, you get quick access to favorite saved locations.

The developer says it doesn’t track users, keep logs, or send location data to its own servers, a genuine rarity in this category. Subscription pricing runs $2.99 monthly, $14.99 yearly, or $59.99 for a lifetime unlock. A Family plan covering multiple users costs $4.99 monthly, $24.99 yearly, or $99.99 for lifetime access.

If you want a weather app that looks this good and backs it up with real substance, Mercury remains one of the more polished picks around.

Hello Weather

Most weather apps compete on how much they can show you. Hello Weather competes on how little it needs to. Current conditions, an hourly outlook, and the daily forecast all live on a single screen, and tapping any specific number opens it into a clean, readable chart instead of burying you in digits. It’s one of the more minimalist weather apps you’ll find, but that doesn’t mean it lacks features.

The highlight here is a source picker built right into the main screen, which lets you swap between weather data providers and compare one forecast against another in seconds, no digging through settings required. Most of the options in that picker are reserved for paying users, though. Only a couple of sources come free, and everything else, including advanced radar, air quality and pollen data, custom home screen icons, and the Apple Watch app, requires upgrading to Pro.

That Apple Watch app is reason enough to consider subscribing. It features a large complication that packs your location, current temperature, and the day’s high and low into a single glance, with a second tap revealing wind, humidity, pressure, and UV, exactly the kind of layered detail that’s hard to fit on a watch face this small.

Pricing for Pro runs $1.99 monthly, $19.99 yearly, or $99.99 as a one-time lifetime purchase, while a Family plan covering multiple users costs $2.99 monthly, $29.99 yearly, or $149.99 for lifetime access.

Ventusky

Open Ventusky expecting a normal forecast app and you’ll be briefly confused. This app looks and behaves more like professional meteorology software than something built for checking if you need a jacket. It pulls from more than 80 weather maps alongside a 14-day hyperlocal forecast with hourly resolution. You can also scrub through hours or days of animated map data to see how a storm is actually moving, which feels better than reading a list of hourly figures.

The feature that I liked the most was the webcam layer, which draws on more than 40,000 live feeds worldwide, so you can check actual conditions in a given spot instead of relying on modeled data alone.

Ventusky also goes deep for specific use cases. Pilots get wind data at 16 altitude levels from ground level up to 13 kilometers, sailors get wave and marine data, and a newer fire-tracking feature uses satellite detection to follow wildfires in near real time.

Remarkably, the core experience stays entirely free of ads, which is rare for something this data-dense. Premium unlocks unlimited layers, advanced widgets, all notifications, wear OS radar, and support for up to 25 devices, for $4.99 monthly or $19.99 yearly. Premium+ adds account sharing across up to 25 devices for $5.99 monthly or $24.99 yearly.

Windy.com

Windy is the app you move to when a standard forecast stops being enough. Its interactive maps let you set both a layer and an altitude, so you can check wind conditions at ground level or thousands of feet up. Waves, tides, pressure, and precipitation all get the same treatment.

The specialist tools are where Windy really separates itself. Pilots get icing and clear air turbulence layers with a flight level range selector, so they can see conditions across a whole route at once, along with airport data that includes METAR, TAF, and NOTAM information. Sailors get a Passage Planner with isochrone routing, which plots a course around how wind and currents shift along the way rather than drawing a straight line between two points. There’s also an avalanche danger layer that pulls in official bulletins, and a fire danger layer that updates hourly to show how risk shifts between day and night.

All of this comes without ads. The catch is that Windy doesn’t hold your hand. The interface throws a lot at you at once, and the first few sessions can feel overwhelming. But professionals will feel right at home with this app.

While most of what Windy offers is free, there is a Premium tier that unlocks tighter, more frequent data for $2.99 monthly or $24.99 yearly. It offers 1-hour and 15-day outlooks with 4 to 6 updates a day, 24-hour radar and satellite loops with a full year of archives, extra maps including tide forecasts, and a model comparison tool to find the best model for your needs.

Two community favorites worth a look

Both of these apps came up repeatedly during my research, but they’re not available in my region. So everything below is based on what users report, not my own experience.

Acme Weather

This app comes from the same team that built Dark Sky, and it approaches forecasting differently from anything else here. Instead of showing one confident prediction, it lays out a spread of alternate forecast lines next to the main one, so you can see how much different models agree. A tight cluster means the forecast is solid, while a wide spread means it’s worth checking again later.

Notifications are where Acme most clearly picks up where Dark Sky left off. Users point to the fine-tuned alerts they’d missed since the latter’s shutdown, and you can build custom ones for whatever you care about, from wind and UV to rainbows and good sunsets. Community reports feed into this too, letting people nearby flag what they’re actually seeing.

There are two major downsides worth knowing about. Acme costs $25 yearly after a two-week trial, with no free tier at all, and it’s only available in North America and Europe for now.

EverythingWeather

EverythingWeather pulls its data straight from the National Weather Service and NOAA with no private-sector model layered on top, so you’re seeing what a working meteorologist sees. The app is built by an NWS meteorologist, and users with meteorology backgrounds of their own single it out for exactly that reason.

A forecast discussion tab carries the technical write-ups NWS offices publish, alongside Storm Prediction Center outlooks, river level notifications, and an extended forecast running out to day 11. It’s also completely ad-free. The gripes are minor, mostly a missing feels-like temperature and the occasional delayed alert.

The catch is coverage. It only works in the United States and its territories. The core app is free, with a Pro tier unlocking additional features.

Also worth checking out

These didn’t make the top eight, but each does something worth knowing about. If none of the apps above fit what you’re after, one of these might.

• MyRadar: Worth a look if you want storm coverage and weather updates in one place, since the video hub pulls it all together instead of sending you elsewhere to catch up.
• Forecast Bar: This one’s for the Apple Watch crowd, with over 100 configurable complications covering hourly forecasts, graphs, and custom modular layouts.
• Weatherology: If you’d rather hear your forecast than read it, this is the only app here where broadcast meteorologists record it themselves instead of handing it to a synthesized voice.
• Not Boring Weather: Made for anyone tired of staring at numbers, since conditions come through 3D visuals, animation, and sound rather than a wall of figures.
• Weather Kitty: Get this one if you want your forecast wrapped in over 1,000 cat photos that change with conditions and time of day. You can add your own cat as a theme too.
• WeatherCaster: Built for sailors and hikers who need to know when conditions will shift rather than just whether they will, plotting the whole day as a single scrollable chart.

How I tested

I spent a month with these apps on an iPhone 16 Pro running iOS 26 with an Apple Watch Series 10 paired throughout. Instead of working through them one at a time, I kept them all installed and checked the same location across every app, at different times of day and in different conditions, so I could see where they diverged.

What I was judging was the experience, not raw forecast accuracy. A month isn’t long enough to draw meaningful conclusions about which app predicts rain best, and doing that properly means tracking predictions against outcomes over months, across seasons and regions.

So I focused on what you can actually assess in daily use instead, like how quickly an app tells you what you need, whether the widgets and complications are worth putting on your screen or watch face, how much friction sits between opening the app and getting an answer, and how the app holds up when the weather turns.