Control the Weather

See the future, stay dry and avoid UV with Apple’s excellent app

- Carrie Marshall

IT WILL TAKE 10 minutes

YOU WILL LEARN How to tailor the Weather app to your needs

YOU’LL NEED iOS/iPadOS 15

We’re obsessed with the weather. We check the forecast when we’re planning to walk the dog, we check it when we’re deciding what to wear, and we check it when we’re deciding when or even whether to go out. So we’re delighted by the new Weather widgets in iOS/iPadOS 15, and by the new iPhone Weather app. It does all the basic stuff brilliantly but it can also warn you of imminent downpours, of air quality issues, and of potentially dangerous UV levels.

As we’ll see in this tutorial, it looks pretty amazing too. You’ll notice that while the Weather widget is available on iPad, the actual Weather app isn’t: if you tap the widget for more information it just opens Weather.com in Safari. According to Craig Federighi of Apple, that’s because Apple wants to do more than just copy the iPhone app across; he says Apple wants to make a Weather app that makes use of the iPad’s bigger screen “in every possible way”.

HOW TO Check on the weather

1 Use the widget

You can have the Weather widget as a Home Screen or Lock Screen widget. You might prefer the latter on your iPhone, so that the Weather widget is large and easily checked. On the bigger iPad, it suits being on the Home Screen.

2 See the summary

Tap the widget or open the app and you’ll be taken to this summary screen, which gives you an instant forecast for the next hour and an hourly forecast for the next four hours. You may also see the Stay Dry option shown here.