BOM Weather 4+

Totally recommend it

I started using this app in 2019. I got this app from a recommendation by my friends because the other apps aren’t always trustworthy. This app comes straight from the government and you can totally trust it. The only thing I would add is to make an app without internet. For example I went camping lately with no wifi. There was no service and I couldn’t see the weather. This really annoyed me because I needed to know if it was gonna rain or not. To see the weather I had to get in the car and drive like a long time which I obviously didn’t do. If it is possible please fix this. Even if it is just the temperature it would be great. 👍🏽 anyway this app is awesome and it is probably the app for weather no cap. So if you are looking for an app that tells you the true weather look no further, you’ve found it. 👏🏿

Accessibility with VoiceOver

As a blind voice-over user, I found the old app reasonably accessible and really only want to check temperatures, humidity, wind, rain and basic forecast information. The new app seems to be as accessible as previously and I do like having hourly forecasts. However, the initial screens for setting up are totally inaccessible and I had to turn VoiceOver off and get my wife to click continue and access the choose location dialogue before I could gain any sort of access. Also, there must be some sort of Alt-tag or something that voiceOver detects when checking the hourly forecasts(Which is not visible on the screen). For instance, from 7 pm this evening, every hour is mostly sunny all through the night and tomorrow. 6 pm and earlier had a 20% or greater chance of rain whereas it is 5% or less from 7pm.
In this day and age, I think all blind technology users would hope and expect developers to be on top of accessibility issues and test new releases with screen readers etc. I hope these matters can soon be addressed.
With thanks - Tom

Developer Response ,

Thank you for letting us know of this experience. Ensuring our digital products and services are accessible and inclusive is of the utmost importance. We appreciate your feedback to help us learn and we are actively working to improve the accessibility of our app in a future release.

It has become gimmicky

Clearly BOM don’t read these reviews. The app used to just do forecasts, and at a glance you could see what they were forecasting. First they “smoothed” the radar to make the data rainbow and blobby. Then they introduced quartile chance of rain, but don’t show that in the table of upcoming-days predictions, just vague words like “some showers”, when they really could just provide the probability quartiles. And now, they’ve introduced “predicted radar”… so you get a couple of seconds of actual radar, followed by the same amount of predicted radar, which seems to always be wrong. There is no option to NOT show predicted radar. There is no option to change the length of historical radar to show, nor the speed at which to show it. The development of this app is like it’s being driven by a teenage programmer who wants to show lots of bling, but ignores substance and the prime use of the app. Fair enough if it was some commercial piece of junk, but this is a government agency app, and they are pandering to irrelevant bling to make it “fancy”, and it is very quickly losing relevance and utility.