If you are familiar with iOS 5 and 6, you might remember that the older iOS Notification Center had a widget to give you a weekly glance of the weather. iOS 7 completely overhauled the Notification Center to bring in the Today View. Unlike the weather widget in iOS 6, the Today View of iOS 7 Notification Center just provided text notifications for the current weather conditions.
Some of us still want that at-a-glance weather view in the Notification Center. And though Apple has removed its own weather widget, thanks to iOS 8, now third party developers can create their own Notification Center widgets (Today Extensions). In this article, we’ll explore some weather widgets for iOS Notification Center.
Weather apps with iOS Widget support
The following are some of the weather apps that support Today Extensions (weather widgets) for the Notification Center:
AccuWeather
AccuWeather is an award-winning weather service that provides free weather apps for smartphones. For iOS 8, it includes a simple weather widget that lets you catch essential weather information at a glance from the Notification Center. The widget shows the current temperature and weather conditions for the first location (set within the app), along with the maximum and minimum temperature of the day.
To set a particular location for the weather widget, open the AccuWeather app and set your location. If you already have multiple locations configured, the AccuWeather Widget will take the first location in the list. Thus if you need to change the location used by the widget, just reorder your location list accordingly within the app.
After adding or modifying the primary location, it might be required to remove the AccuWeather widget from Today View and add it again for the changes to reflect. AccuWeather is recommended as a weather widget for users who want a simple glance of the weather from the Notification Center. If you want more detailed weather information, Weather Live Free might be more useful.
>>Enable Today Extensions (Weather Widget) on iOS
Weather Live
This free weather app includes a detailed weather widget for your Notification Center. Once you add the widget to the Notification Center, it shows the current temperature, wind speed, precipitation, minimum and maximum temperatures in the first line. Below that, you can see the daily and weekly weather trend, quite similar to the iOS 6 weather widget.
Similar to AccuWeather, the information that Weather Live provides on the Notification Center is based on the first location set within the app. If you already have multiple locations added, you might want to reorder them to bring your preferred widget location to the top of the list.
With so much weather information in a Today widget, the display might feel a bit cluttered on small screen iOS devices. This weather widget is thus especially recommended for large screen devices like iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus or the iPad.
Yahoo Weather
Yahoo Weather already had a gorgeous weather app for iOS devices, and with support for iOS 8, it has introduced a weather widget for the Notification Center. The widget provides an at-a-glance weather report of your current location in the Notification Center. Unlike the other weather apps mentioned here, the Yahoo Weather widget won’t fetch weather information for any of the preferred locations set within the app. Instead, it fetches weather information for the current location. So in order to use the widget, you need to keep Location Services turned on.
But keeping location services turned on may consume more battery power. On the other hand, AccuWeather and WeatherLive widgets can fetch location from the app preferences and do not depend on Location Services; hence they might be more preferable over the Yahoo widget.
These are some of the best weather widgets we could find for the iOS Notification Center. If we have missed any app worth mentioning here, let us know in the comments below.
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