★ Bout VII · new · available now ★
Vane
Weather apps are ad-laden trash fires. Vane is the forecast and nothing else: four home-screen widgets, the temperature up in the status bar, ten days out. The whole thing is a 59 KB APK. No ads. Nobody buys your location.
★ Take it home ★
Get Vane
The screen borrows Apple's weather layout and wears Bantamware's ink: hourly strip, ten days of range bars, cards for wind, UV, sunrise, and pressure. The four widgets run from a full 4×4 down to a one-row bar, and if you turn on the status bar readout, the current temperature becomes its own little badge next to the clock. Pull that notification open and you get the week's spread and a radar snapshot.
Vane also warns you. When rain looks likely in the next few hours it says so once, ahead of time, anywhere in the world. In the US, official National Weather Service alerts show as a red banner in the app, and the severe ones come through as real notifications.
Forecast data comes from Open-Meteo and warnings from the National Weather Service. Neither wants an account, and the only thing your phone ever sends them is a pair of coordinates. Save cities, or let Vane follow the phone: land somewhere new and everything updates on its own.
★ The numbers ★
Tale of the tape
Vane against the ad-funded weather app. Their column shifts with every store update; ours is a number you can verify against the signed APK.
★ Fighting weight ★
Small is a feature
The widget is the app
Checking the weather takes two seconds, so the widgets do the whole job. All four draw from the last good forecast, which means they keep working in airplane mode, and they refresh themselves in the background. It's entirely possible to use Vane for a year and never open it.
The status bar is a thermometer
Flip one switch and the temperature becomes the status bar icon: actual digits in a little badge you can pick out at a glance. Conditions, the day's spread, and the wind sit in the shade underneath, with radar when you expand it. It never makes a sound.
Smaller than one ad elsewhere
The whole app weighs 59 KB, which is less than a single banner ad in the apps it replaces. The JSON parser, the HTTP client, and the weather glyphs are all written in-house. Nothing is imported.