Yahoo has launched a new weather app for Android which provides forecasts-at-a-glance, current weather conditions, and weather-related photos from Flickr.
The photos are a nice touch which gives the app an attractive, ever-changing look that sets it apart from other weather apps. The home screen shows current conditions and a brief forecast in portrait mode — and when you tilt your phone to landscape you get more details such as the sunrise, sunset, barometric pressure, humidity level and wind speed.
You can also add additional locations and switch between locations by swiping left or right. There’s also a new widget that lets you place a weather photo on your home screen and view the current weather conditions.
But there are a few quirks that make the Yahoo Weather app rather odd.
The home screen shows you cute little icons that lets you know whether it’ll be partly sunny or mostly cloudy, I suppose, but there’s nothing that tells how likely it is to rain on a given day.
If you want to view an extended forecast, the app dumps you out to the Yahoo Weather page in a web browser. There’s also no way to see any forecast details at all from the home screen widget.
Considering the fact that Yahoo powers the weather widget that comes with iOS, you’d think that the company would have figured out by now what it takes to make a good mobile weather app. Unfortunately the Yahoo Weather app for Android falls far short.
It’s available as a free download from the Android Market if you want to try it for yourself.
