Gorgeous New Design
Of course, if you’ve opened the Weather app in iOS 15, you’ll have already noticed the remarkable new design that even includes an animated background — as long as you’re using an iPhone XS/XR or newer, that is. There’s much more to these than just some static animations, however. Apple claims that there as “thousands of variations” of these animated backgrounds that are intended to “accurately represent the sun position, clouds, and precipitation.” Apple has undoubtedly relied on the machine learning chops of the A12 Bionic’s Neural Engine to power this, which is why older iPhones are being left out.
Regional Limitations:
Unfortunately, while the Weather app can be used just about everywhere, not all the data is available in every country and region.
The current weather conditions and the 10-day forecast should be available in almost every country, but more advanced features like notifications, next-hour precipitation, maps, and air quality are more limited:
- Severe Weather Information is available in Australia, Canada, Japan, U.S., most of Europe, Brazil, India, Mexico, Russia, Thailand, and China mainland.
- Next-Hour Precipitation is officially available only in Ireland, the U.K., and the U.S. This includes both forecasts in the Weather app and notifications.
- Air Quality is limited to Canada, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, the UK, the U.S., and China mainland.
- Weather Maps covering temperature and 12-hour precipitation are available for most countries, while next-hour precipitation and air quality maps are naturally limited to those countries where those features are otherwise available.
It’s also worth keeping in mind that Apple lists Weather feature availability on a per-country basis, so your actual experience may vary. For example, we’ve been getting next-hour precipitation forecasts in Toronto, Canada since iOS 14 last year, and this now includes the new rain notifications and next-hour precipitation maps in iOS 15 too.
That is likely a function of how Dark Sky handles its data, as the same discrepancy has existed for years in other apps that use Dark Sky as a source, such as Carrot Weather, where we’ve been getting next-hour precipitation forecasts for the past few years.