There’s no shortage of weather apps in the iOS App Store, that’s for sure. Head to the weather category and you’ll find hundreds, mostly without any immediate indication of how each one is different from the next. Yet on the Apple TV, so far the opposite is true.
The Apple TV’s App Store is significantly newer — not even a year old at the time of writing — but there is a glaring lack of weather apps so far or at least a glaring lack of solid ones. As someone who has gone through almost all of them to try them out, I’ve put together this list of the four best weather apps on Apple TV in no particular order. If you’re looking to expand on the weather capabilities Siri already has built-in, give these a try.
1. The Weather TV
The Weather TV app is arguably the best-looking weather app for Apple TV. It has a simple, elegant, informative user interface with a pleasing background image that changes with the forecast. It’s stripped of all bells and whistles and just gives you what you need: current temperature, hourly forecast, a seven-day forecast and a brief description of the day and week ahead.
It doesn’t, however, support saving or viewing multiple locations. You can’t even search for a location other than you own since it only uses your current one. I’m okay with this, though, since televisions aren’t meant to move around much. The Weather TV has a beautiful UI coupled with accurate forecasting. It’s $0.99 in the Apple TV App Store.
Important: There is no current way to link directly to Apple TV apps. Instead, you’ll have to go to your Apple TV and search manually for these apps in the App Store and download them there. I will, however, provide a link for apps in this article that have corresponding iOS apps as well.
2. The Weather Network
The Weather Network often goes unappreciated but has a pretty terrific weather app for Apple TV. Hourly, 36-hour, and an extensive 14-day forecast are all organized into separate tiles that you can flick through to highlight. Plus at the top, you can get a glance of the current weather conditions plus visibility, sunrise, sunset, wind, gust and humidity.
The app also includes severe weather alerts plus live streaming video from The Weather Network Live and other on-demand videos. You can save multiple locations and switch between them to by flicking up on your Apple TV remote. A great price:the Weather Network is free.
3. Forecast Bar
Forecast Bar provides the most in-depth forecasting out of any weather app for Apple TV I’ve used so far, and that’s quite a few. Best of all, the app is powered by the Forecast.io API, one of my favorite sites for a reliable forecast.
As such, Forecast Bar gives you a plethora of information for current conditions like moon phase, UV index, visibility, wind, dew point, pressure and more. Plus, on the right, you can click each day in the extended forecast to see a breakdown of precipitation, wind, humidity or UV index across each hour of that day.
The app comes with loads of customization options including a gorgeous dark theme, plus a Time Machine feature as well to see the weather conditions throughout history. It also has a great widget feature so you can see your different locations and their forecasts right from the Apple TV Home screen. Place the app in the dock to activate this.
Forecast Bar is $4.99 for Apple TV.
4. BloomSky
BloomSky is another minimalistic app similar to The Weather TV. It offers the hourly forecast, five-day, and basic information for your current conditions. However, BloomSky also interestingly features a loop of live video from in the area. When you search for your location, you can pick from different corners of your city to see a video of the sky from that point.
It’s a nice touch, but BloomSky doesn’t have as nice of a UI as The Weather TV. But you can store multiple locations here, and BloomSky is free.
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