Apple / weather / THE WEATHER CHANNEL - RADAR
REVIEW
The Weather Channel app still earns its keep on the radar tab.
Apple Weather absorbed Dark Sky and the default app is now genuinely good — but the legacy network's app is still the one to open when the sky looks wrong.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 10, 2026 · 4 MIN READ
The Weather Channel - Radar
THE WEATHER CHANNEL INTERACTIVE
OUR SCORE
7.4
APPLE
★ 4.8
PRICE
Free
Apple Weather absorbed Dark Sky in 2023 and quietly became good. The hyperlocal precipitation alerts that made Dark Sky a cult favorite now live one swipe down from the lock screen, no extra app required. For a category that always seemed three minutes from being eaten by the OS, the third-party weather app should be on its way out.
It mostly is. What survives, and what The Weather Channel still does better than the default, is the radar — a full-screen, layer-rich, scrubbable map with a forward projection that reads as a separate product grafted onto a thinner forecast app. The forecast tab is fine. The radar tab is the one that earns the install.
That split has gotten sharper since Francisco Partners bought The Weather Company off IBM in 2024 and the app’s release cadence picked up. The data is still industry-grade. The chrome around it is still trying to figure out what a free weather app is supposed to be in a world where the OS handles the basics for nothing.
Apple Weather is now the better daily glance, but when storms move in the radar tab is still the one to open.
FEATURES
The home screen leads with the current condition, the next several hours, and a ten-day outlook. Tap through to the radar and you get live Doppler with a rewind scrubber, a forward-projected 24-hour future radar in the free tier, and 72 hours behind the Premium paywall. Storm tracker overlays watches, warnings, and lightning strikes on the same canvas without forcing a tab change.
The custom-activity alerts are the part most reviewers ignore. You can name a window — "Saturday morning run", "Tuesday tee time" — and the app pings you the day before with the conditions that actually matter for that activity, not just a generic forecast. Travel Hub pulls flight cancellations and turbulence forecasts onto the same screen as your destination weather.
The free tier is ad-supported with the usual interstitial-and-banner load. Premium at $29.99 a year strips the ads, unlocks 15-minute precipitation detail, extends the future radar to 72 hours, and bundles a "Perks" program of third-party deals. There is also an Ad-Free-only tier for users who want the trim without the rest.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The radar is the reason to install this. It is fast to load, smooth to scrub, and the layer toggles for clouds, precipitation, temperature, wind, and lightning are organized the way someone who actually watches storms would organize them. Severe-weather push alerts arrive promptly and link straight back to the polygon on the map.
Under Francisco Partners since the 2024 IBM divestment, the data pipeline is the same one feeding weather.com and Weather Underground — which is to say, it is one of the most-tested forecast stacks in the industry. The 4.7-star rating across more than a million reviews is not a fluke.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
The free experience is heavy. Ads break up the scroll, video auto-plays surface where they shouldn't, and the home screen layers in cross-promotion for travel content, sponsored articles, and Premium upsells in a way that makes Apple Weather feel monastic by comparison. The recent navigation redesign also broke muscle memory for long-time users, and the App Store reviews of the last twelve months reflect it.
The 2020 Los Angeles settlement over location-data sharing is also worth remembering. The app now discloses how location is used and what it is used for, but the underlying business model — free weather subsidized by ad-tech and aggregated location data — has not fundamentally changed. Premium removes the ads but does not opt you out of the data side.
CONCLUSION
Install it for the radar, the storm alerts, and the activity windows. Leave Apple Weather as the lock-screen widget for the daily glance. If you take weather seriously enough to pay for it, Carrot Weather's $20 a year still buys a more opinionated app — but the Weather Channel's radar tab is the one most non-meteorologists will reach for when the sky looks wrong.