Google Play / weather / 1WEATHER FORECASTS & RADAR
REVIEW
1Weather has spent a decade being the friendly weather app on Android, and it shows in both directions.
A 4.33 Play Store rating across 274,000+ users says the long-running Handmark app still earns its keep — even as a 2012-era information architecture quietly competes with a Pro tier that exists mostly to hide the ads.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 11, 2026 · 3 MIN READ
1Weather Forecasts & Radar
ONELOUDER APPS
OUR SCORE
7.1
GOOGLE PLAY
★ 4.3
PRICE
Free
In-app purchases
1Weather has been on the Play Store since January 2012, which makes it old enough to remember when Android weather apps competed on lock-screen widgets rather than AI assistants. Fourteen years and several ownership changes later — Handmark to OneLouder Apps to Mobinet Group — the app is still here, still updating, and still sitting at a 4.33 rating across more than a quarter-million users. That’s the highest user score among the mainstream Android weather contenders the App Comrade desk has reviewed this month, and it tells you something the feature comparison won’t.
The thing 1Weather earned that score on is friendliness. The tabbed home screen — Today, Hourly, Weekly, Precipitation, Radar — lands you exactly where you opened the app to land, rather than asking you to scroll past a video card and an allergy tile and a promo for the parent network’s TV channel before you get to your hourly forecast. The widget suite is comprehensive in a way that respects how most people actually use a weather app on Android, which is to glance at the home screen and never open the app at all. The forecast data is competitive with The Weather Channel for the daily-life use case it’s tuned for.
What it isn’t is a 2026 Material 3 design or a 90-day forecast vendor or an AI chat surface. The free tier carries a meaningful ad load, the visual language is aging visibly, and Pro exists mostly to hide the advertising rather than to add capability you can’t get elsewhere. The honest read is that 1Weather is the friendly long-running incumbent that has outlasted most of its 2012 cohort by doing the boring things consistently — and the user rating reflects that, even when a feature-by-feature spec sheet wouldn’t.
1Weather feels like a 2014 Android weather app that grew up gracefully — which is praise and a caveat at the same time.
FEATURES
1Weather is the long-running consumer weather app from Handmark, the Sprint-era mobile shop that became OneLouder Apps and is now folded into Mobinet Group's app portfolio. It launched on Android in early 2012 and has held a steady place on the Play Store ever since, currently sitting at 4.33 stars across more than 274,000 ratings — a notably higher score than the heavier-hitting brands AccuWeather and The Weather Channel ship to the same audience.
The free app stacks current conditions, an hourly strip, a 12-week long-range outlook, an animated precipitation radar, severe-weather alerts pulled from NWS where applicable, and a tabbed home screen that splits "Today", "Hourly", "Weekly", "Precipitation" and "Radar" into separate dedicated views rather than the long single scroll most competitors default to. A wide widget suite — clock-and-weather combos, 4x1 forecast strips, transparent radar tiles, a circular condition badge — is the part of the app long-time users tend to mention first.
Monetisation is a free, ad-supported tier and 1Weather Pro, an in-app upgrade that removes the advertising and unlocks a handful of extras (more radar layers, expanded notifications, extended hourly data). Pricing is shown in-app and varies by region.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The widget story is genuinely strong. 1Weather has had a Pixel-friendly widget set since long before Material You made widgets fashionable again, and the current build keeps that lineage intact — multiple sizes, transparent options, lock-screen support where the Android version allows it, and a configuration screen that lets you pick layout and refresh interval per widget rather than per app. For a user whose primary weather interaction is glancing at the home screen, that's the load-bearing feature, and 1Weather still does it better than most.
The tabbed home screen is the other quiet win. Splitting hourly, weekly and radar into named tabs instead of a single endless scroll means you can land directly on the view you actually opened the app for. It's a 2012 information-architecture choice that has aged unexpectedly well against the long-scroll trend that swallowed Weather.com and AccuWeather. The forecast data itself, sourced from Foreca with NWS layered on for U.S. severe alerts, is competitive with the mainstream consumer apps for daily-life decisions even if it doesn't try to match AccuWeather's MinuteCast or The Weather Channel's Storm Radar feature set.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
The free tier is heavily ad-supported, and the format mix is the part recent reviewers single out — banner ads at the bottom of most screens, interstitials between tab switches, and occasional video pre-rolls on radar interactions. It's lighter than AccuWeather's free tier but the cadence is real, and the per-tab navigation means you trip the interstitial more often than you would on a long-scroll competitor. Pro removes essentially all of it, which makes the upgrade pitch feel structural rather than additive.
The visual design is showing its age. The tab bar, the iconography, and the typography all land closer to mid-2010s Android than to a current Material 3 build, and the most-recent April 2026 release notes are largely housekeeping rather than a refresh. There's nothing broken about the look — long-time users probably read it as familiar — but new installs coming from Pixel Weather or Samsung Weather will notice the gap immediately. A small concern, but one that compounds against the ad cadence on free.
CONCLUSION
Install 1Weather if you live on widgets, prefer a tabbed home screen to an endless scroll, and either tolerate the ad mix on free or are willing to pay Pro to clear it. Skip it if you want a modern Material 3 build out of the box — Pixel Weather and Samsung Weather both look closer to 2026 even if their feature set is thinner. The app is a reliable, well-rated incumbent doing what it has done well for fourteen years; the question is whether that's the era of weather app you want on your phone in 2026.