Weather, by the numbers

The Weather Channel - Radar alone accounts for 6,002,358 ratings out of 26,553,607 logged across the entire Weather category. One app owns roughly a quarter of everything this category has ever earned in feedback, and that single fact sets the tone for the rest of the data: people pick weather apps for radar accuracy and forecast trust, not novelty. Pricing backs this up. 4,085 of the 4,670 tracked apps are free, putting the free share at 87.5%, while only 583 apps charge anything, at 12.5%. Among the paid apps, prices stay low: 165 sit under a dollar, 239 land between $1 and $2.99, and the numbers fall off fast after that, 92 in the $3-4.99 band, 51 in $5-9.99, and just 36 apps asking $10 or more. Weather is a free-first category with a small, stubborn premium tail, and that tail is selling radar precision to people who've already been burned by a bad forecast.

Ratings don't spread evenly across publishers, and the gap is stark. Gray Television Group, Inc. runs 111 apps and holds 797,776 ratings, about 3% of the category's total. Sinclair Broadcast Group follows with 52 apps and 0.6%. After that the drop-off gets steep: LIN Television Corporation (29 apps, 0.1%), corey hoggard (29 apps, less than 0.1%), Nexstar Broadcasting (27 apps, 0.1%), and ID Mobile SA (23 apps, less than 0.1%). The top three publishers by app count combine for just 3.7% of all ratings in the category. Local broadcast groups have flooded the store with hundreds of nearly identical, station-branded weather apps, and even together they barely register against the leaders. App count and user trust are simply measuring two different things here.

The list of top earners follows a clear pattern. Behind The Weather Channel - Radar's 6,002,358 ratings comes Yahoo!天気 at 2,566,692, WeatherBug: Weather Forecast at 2,181,882, an app simply named Weather at 1,802,597, AccuWeather: Weather Forecast at 1,496,268, BBC Weather at 1,242,546, MyRadar Accurate Weather Radar at 1,080,914, and Clime: NOAA Weather Radar Live at 1,051,321. None of these built a following through branding tricks. MyRadar and Clime take their names almost straight from what they do, radar, and both still crossed a million ratings. People reward apps that answer one question fast and correctly: is the sky about to turn bad. The local news personalities and extra widgets are noise the top eight never needed.

The median rating across the category's 2,914 rated apps sits at 4.6, and that number hides a real spread underneath it: 1,715 apps land at 4.5 stars or better while 321 fall below 3.0. Satisfaction runs broad here, though plenty of apps still miss the mark. Size tells a cleaner story. Median download size is only 39.9 MB, and among apps with a known size, 2,803 sit under 50 MB entirely. Weather apps don't need bulk to earn good ratings, since the value lives in the data feed rather than the graphics. A radar app pulling live NOAA data doesn't need 500 MB of assets, and only 16 apps in the entire category even reach that size.

Update frequency is where this category can't fake it. 3,250 of the 4,670 tracked apps shipped an update in the last 12 months, close to 70% of the whole set. Forecast models shift, radar feeds change, severe-weather alert systems get revised, and an app that stops updating starts feeding you bad information within a season. The quieter number is the roughly 1,400 apps that haven't shipped a recent update, and given how many of those sit in the local-broadcast clusters with barely any ratings, that's probably where the abandoned, half-maintained apps are hiding.

If you're picking a weather app based on these numbers, go where the ratings already went: The Weather Channel - Radar, WeatherBug, AccuWeather, MyRadar, Clime. Those high rating counts reflect millions of people checking accuracy against reality over years, not hype. Skip the standalone local-station apps unless you need that specific market's coverage; 29 apps from corey hoggard pulling 439 ratings total shows exactly what happens when a name gets recycled without ever building a real following. And if you're weighing the $10-plus tier, you're paying for the radar depth that free tiers cut first, more than for any extra feature bolted on for its own sake.