Weather, by the numbers

Nobody pays for weather. You get it handed to you. Weather apps are free by default: out of 2,921 apps tracked, 2,404 don't cost a thing, and only 517 ask for money at all, a paid share of 17.7% against 82.3% free. Even the ones that do charge stay cheap: 147 sit in the $0.01 to 0.99 range, 205 land between $1 and 2.99, and just 35 apps ask $10 or more. Most developers skip pricing altogether and lean on volume, ads, or a subscription tacked onto a free version. A $10+ weather app is the outlier here. It bets against how this category usually makes money.

The category's 23,735,468 ratings don't spread evenly across publishers. Gray Television Group, Inc. ties for the most apps with 27 and turns that into 407,542 ratings, 1.7% of the category, a modest but real showing. corey hoggard also has 27 apps but pulls in only 410 ratings, well under 0.1% of the total. LIN Television Corporation shows the same gap: 25 apps bring in just 24,129 ratings (0.1%), and ID Mobile SA (23 apps), LionsApp di Nallbati Elton (22 apps), and hidehiko aihara (20 apps) each hold shares too small to register, even with comparable app counts. Add up the top three publishers by app count and you still only reach 1.8% of all category ratings. Cranking out lots of weather apps doesn't put you in front of the people actually leaving reviews. Counting apps and earning attention turn out to be two very different games.

The apps that pile up ratings look nothing like those high-count publishers. They stand alone, carry a name people already trust, and own their corner of the market outright. The Weather Channel - Radar sits at 5,964,174 ratings by itself, more than double the next contender, Yahoo!天気, at 2,537,630. WeatherBug: Weather Forecast (2,178,964), AccuWeather: Weather Forecast (1,496,281), and BBC Weather (1,240,604) round out a top five built on established forecasting names rather than sprawling catalogs of apps. Against a category median rating of 4.6, these leaders show exactly where attention lands in Weather: a handful of trusted, single app names, not the scattershot approach publishers take when they chase volume through dozens of barely rated listings.