In a bid to stand out in the bustling weather app crowd, crowdsourced app Sunshine is adding a new personalization feature — giving users the ability to specify how hot or cold the weather feels to them.
The app then uses these subjective taps — on a super simple scale of “freezing” through to “hot” — to learn each user’s temperature preferences and serve up more relevant weather reports to them.
“60-degrees isn’t a one-size-fits-all temperature,” says co-founder and CEO Katerina Stroponiati. “For some, it might as well be the Arctic tundra. For others it’s shorts weather. So when it’s 60-degrees outside, how do you know if it’s sweater 60-degrees or flip-flops 60-degrees?”
“Sunshine learns about you — like what’s cold or hot for you. It also learns every time you actively report to the community on sky conditions and hazards, translating this information into weather predictions,” she adds.
Sunshine only launched last October, with a stated mission of humanizing a data-heavy app category with something a little more consumer friendly.
Not that they’re the first with the idea of making weather apps more usefully practical, though. Swackett, for example, has been offering weather-based clothes suggestions for years, while in the “easier on the eye” category there’s the likes of Beautiful Weather (heavy on the cutesy animations) or YoWindow, to name but two.
Why is weather such a well-ploughed app furrow? Because a worthy weather app has the potential to earn one of the more well-thumbed places on a smartphone users’ home screen (versus being siloed away in a forgotten folder).
“Weather is context to many things, from clothing to eating and traveling,” says Stroponiati, discussing how Sunshine might look to monetize its free app future. “There are tons of brands that are related with this field and are interested in getting promoted in Sunshine. Having said that, we won’t put any banners or intrusive ads in the app. Our first goal is to be the most exciting app ou