Best Weather Widget for Android If Google’s Is Not Enough
Most phones already have one: Google's At a Glance or Samsung's Weather widget. For more detail with no ads, Weawow is free. Plus a fix for stale widgets.
A temperature and an icon on the home screen come with most Android phones. Install an app when you want an hourly graph, a radar, a flip clock, or a forecast from a weather service you trust. Overdrop is the pick for the best-looking home screen, accepting ads unless you pay. Meteogram Weather Widget shows the forecast as a graph, and Chronus puts a clock and the weather in one widget, with Sense Flip Clock & Weather for the flip style.
At a Glance and Google’s other weather
At a Glance is Google’s widget for the date, the weather and what is next on your calendar. Google’s Android help says you can add it on most Android devices: it sits under Google in the widget list. On a Pixel it is on by default, and it also shows severe weather warnings on the lock screen and the always-on display. Google says the full version is for Pixels on Android 12 and up.
The Google app has weather in two more places. A weather card sits above the Discover feed when you open the app, and the Search widget can carry a weather shortcut. Open the Google app, tap your profile picture, then Settings and Customize Search widget, and pick the shortcuts you want. If the card disappears, Google’s fix is to check that you are signed in and that Discover is turned on.
Google’s forecast is its own. Its help page on how Google Weather works says it comes from an in-house system fed by models and observations from agencies such as NOAA, the Met Office, ECMWF and Germany’s DWD.
Pixel 6 and later phones, and the Pixel Tablet, have a full weather app from Google. Its help page lists a 10-day forecast, air quality, humidity, a weather map and a pollen count. Google Play shows no ads label on it. The listing also calls it Pixel’s exclusive weather app, so it is not something to go looking for on a Samsung or a Xiaomi.
Adding a widget to the home screen
Samsung says most Galaxy devices come with a Weather widget. If yours is missing, touch and hold an empty part of the home screen, tap Widgets, choose Weather and pick a size. Touch and hold the widget afterwards to change its layout or its location.
The steps are the same for a built-in widget and for one that came with an app. This is Google’s version:
- Touch and hold an empty space on a home screen.
- Tap Widgets.
- Find the app that has the widget and tap it to see what it offers.
- Touch and hold the widget, slide it to where you want it and lift your finger.
To resize it, touch and hold the widget and let go. If it can be resized, an outline with dots appears. Drag the dots.
Weawow and its missing ads
Of the eleven main apps in this article, ten carry Google Play’s “Contains ads” label. Weather & Widget – Weawow is the exception, and its listing says there are no ads and no tracking. The in-app purchase is a donation. The developer says it is optional, and that a one-time donation unlocks AccuWeather and Foreca as extra forecast sources.
The free sources already include the US National Weather Service, Germany’s DWD, Meteo France, MET Norway and OpenWeather, and the app can plot several of them on one graph so you can see where they disagree. For the home screen there are 14 widget styles, from a 1×1 square to a full-screen layout, and you choose what each one shows: wind, UV index, air quality and so on.
Apps built around the widget
All five here are free with ads and in-app purchases.
If appearance matters most, look at Overdrop, from overdrop.app. Its listing counts more than 70 widget designs and a dozen themes, with live radar. The premium upgrade removes the ads and unlocks more designs and all of its weather providers.
Meteograms Ltd’s Meteogram Weather Widget draws the forecast as a graph: temperature, wind, pressure and whatever else you switch on, in a widget you can stretch to any size, from over 30 data sources. The listing claims over 5,000 settings. The paid upgrade removes the adverts and the watermark on the chart.
Today Weather, from todayweather.co, names its sources by country in its listing, among them the US National Weather Service, the UK Met Office, Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology and the Japan Meteorological Agency. Its widgets include clock and weather, radar and weather charts.
DvTonder’s Chronus Information Widgets suits people who want one widget for several things. Its main widgets combine a clock, the weather from 12 providers, your calendar, news and tasks, and its maker says they share the same background services to save battery and data.
Sense Flip Clock & Weather, from MACHAPP Software Ltd, puts the time, the date, the current weather and the daily forecast in a flip-clock widget, in 4×1, 4×2 and 4×3. If the clock is the part you care about, there is a separate page on clock apps for Android.
AccuWeather, The Weather Channel and other forecasters
These are full weather services with a widget attached, and their listings lead with radar, storm tracking and alerts. Pick one if you follow storms in the US, for the alerts more than the widget, or if you already follow that forecaster. All four are free with ads and in-app purchases.
1Weather, from OneLouder Apps, names ten widget sizes from 1×1 to 5×2, which is more detail than the other three give, along with radar and US National Weather Service alerts. The Weather Channel has a widget that follows dark mode. Weather Forecast by WeatherBug adds lightning alerts and more than 20 map layers. AccuWeather has MinuteCast, a rain forecast for the next four hours.
AccuWeather, The Weather Channel and WeatherBug each mention a paid tier that removes the ads, and AccuWeather’s listing mentions widgets only as part of that tier, Premium+.
YoWindow, from Weather View LLC, is a different kind of app, also free with ads and in-app purchases. Its screen is a landscape where it rains when it rains outside, and its widgets cover clock and weather, the week and 14 days.
Dark Sky, CARROT and Weather Underground
Dark Sky is gone. Its makers announced in 2020 that the company had joined Apple, and their own blog records that the Android app shut down on 1 August 2020.
CARROT Weather is still on Google Play, but its listing says the widget is for Premium Club subscribers only. Weather Underground and Yahoo Weather are still listed too, and neither listing mentions a home screen widget.
When a widget stops updating
A weather widget has to fetch a new forecast while you are not looking at it, and battery settings can stop that. The listing for Simple weather & clock widget says so directly: some phones and battery saving apps turn off the background tasks of widgets from other developers.
On a Pixel, open Settings, Apps, the weather app, App battery usage and check that background usage is allowed. On a Galaxy phone, open Settings, Battery, Background usage limits. Samsung says a deep sleeping app never runs in the background, which is no use to a widget. Add the weather app to Never auto sleeping apps. Our piece on battery saver apps for Android explains these settings.
