Great Weather

First Impression

I downloaded Great Weather because my last app kept crashing right when I needed to check the radar for my morning bike commute. The 4.3-star rating looked promising. The initial setup was fine, and I liked that the main screen showed the “Feels Like” temp right away. It felt clean, if a bit basic. But the polish wore off fast. On my Galaxy A54, the app would sometimes stutter when swiping between the daily and hourly forecasts, which felt sloppy for something so simple. My first real test was a Tuesday in early March. I was heading to a park in the afternoon and the app showed clear skies, but the radar map—if you knew how to read it—showed a thin band of precipitation moving in. That disconnect between the summary and the detailed data was my first red flag.

What It Does Well

When it works, the core forecasting is reliable. The severe weather alerts are legitimately fast; I got a tornado warning ping on my phone a good 15 minutes before the sirens went off last month, which is huge. I rely heavily on the air quality index widget because of my asthma, and it’s been consistently accurate, warning me ahead of hazy days. The radar map itself is detailed and fluid when it loads properly. You can pinch and zoom smoothly, and seeing the precipitation movement helps me time my dog walks to avoid getting caught in rain. For a free app, having no paywalls on these essential features is a significant plus. The ads are just small banners at the bottom. They never pop up or play sound, so they’re easy to ignore.

Where It Falls Short

This is where my patience wears thin. The app has a nasty habit of losing my saved locations. I have my home, my office, and my parents’ town saved. At least three times, after a routine app update, I’ve opened it to find only my current location. Gone. All my other spots vanished into the ether. The “Feels Like” temperature sometimes gets stuck and doesn’t refresh unless I force-close the app. Last Thursday morning, it said it felt like 12°F when it was actually 45°F—a dangerous error if I hadn’t double-checked. The worst bug is location lag. Sometimes when I travel, the app will stubbornly show the weather for where I was two hours ago. I have to manually refresh it multiple times or toggle location permissions. For an app whose entire job is to tell me the weather HERE, that’s a fundamental failure.

Is It Worth the Price?

It’s free, so you’re not risking money. For a casual user who checks once a day, it’s probably fine. But for someone like me who depends on precise, real-time data to plan my day, the bugs make it hard to fully trust. You get what you pay for. The lack of a paid option to remove ads or access more features is a double-edged sword. It’s nice that everyone gets the same tools, but it also means there’s no revenue incentive for the developer to fix the janky issues power users encounter. The value is there, but the reliability isn’t consistent enough for me to wholeheartedly recommend it over more stable competitors, even if they cost a few bucks.

Developer & Support

The developer is listed as 5660 BA, LLC, which tells you nothing. I had the location lag issue happen during a weekend trip to Asheville. It was pouring at my hotel, but the app showed sunny at my home, 200 miles away. I used the contact form in the app’s settings. The auto-reply said “someone will get back to you soon.” I got a real reply four days later. It was a generic list of troubleshooting steps: restart the app, check my phone’s location settings, reinstall. I’d already done all that. My follow-up email asking if this was a known bug was never answered. That experience sealed it for me. If you run into a problem they haven’t already fixed, you’re on your own.

Privacy & Safety

I got it from the Google Play Store. The app needs location access, obviously. I dug into the permissions and it only asks for precise location when the app is in use, which I appreciate. The privacy policy is a standard document saying they use your location data for the service and don’t sell it to third parties. There’s no weird request for contacts or storage. It feels as safe as any other weather app. My bigger concern isn’t data theft; it’s that the app itself is sometimes unreliable with that very data. I don’t worry about them selling my location history. I worry about the app telling me the wrong temperature because it’s using yesterday’s coordinates.