Met Office Weather Application – most accurate weather app for the UK
by Paul Wilks
Jul 18, 2012 7:16 AM –
Install
Met Office Weather Application is the official app of the UK’s national weather service. It features highly accurate weather info, maps, supports multiple locations and comes with a couple of handy widgets. While the UK continues to suffer the wettest, ugliest and most dismal summer ‘since records began’, this app can at least provide some comfort in that it’s about as precise with its predictions as you can get.
Price: Free
Tested on: HTC One X
Content Rating: Everyone
Pros & Cons:
Pros
- Plenty of useful weather information!
- Hugely accurate!
- Easy to use!
- Weather warnings!
- Up to 5 day forecasts!
Cons
Features:
If you live in the UK, you’ll know that our summer so far has been miserable. In a country often known for it’s bad weather, this summer has so far been the worst on record. A friend mentioned anecdotally to me that the UK has only seen 3 days this year where it hasn’t been raining somewhere in the country… 3 days! 
While other countries have had blistering heat waves and high temperatures, we’ve had prolonged showers and regular flooding. However, we stay optimistic, ask anyone from the UK and they’ll pander to the notion that September and October ‘will be nice’. So, if we are going to see light at the end of the tunnel, what better way than to do so using the official app of the UK’s Met Office. Apologies to those in other countries for whom this might not be relevant, I’ll just get you get back to basking in your glorious sunshine. 
The Met office app is, first and foremostly, very accurate- or as accurate as predictions can be. No other organisation in the country has quite the resources, weather stations and powerful computing equipment designed to predict the weather. On that basis, it’s extremely reliable. I was even able to put this to the test yesterday when I hosted a barbecue. The Met Office suggested that, for the first time in about three weeks, it wouldn’t rain and it didn’t. While other apps I use; 1Weather, Weather Flow and HTC’s native weather service all warned of a dank mixture of cloud and rain all day, for once it didn’t ‘bucket down’.
The app too is quite easy to use and you can simply add locations, find forecasts and view additional info such as UV levels, wind speed, visibility, chance of rain (today it’s 95%), sunrise and sunset times. You can also skip to a satellite maps of the UK, viewing weather pressures and incoming cloud formations like a proper meteorologist. These maps can be viewed with different effects such as those which indicate wind speed and rain fall. If the weather is particularly bad, which in some areas it is, the app provides weather warnings, which is pretty handy if you’re under the threat of flooding or the like.
While I was really impressed with the level of detail the app provides and the accuracy of the data, I thought the app itself looked pretty dated. I imagine it would have looked pretty good if you were running Eclair or FroYo on your device but in the era of Ice Cream Sandwich and Jelly Bean, the user interface looks terribly out of date. The widgets too are the kind you’d hide away rather than having pride of place on your homescreen. They come in two sizes: 4×1 and 4×2 and I’ve included them in the pictures below. You’ll notice that the 4×1 widget is actually shorter than the 4×2 widget. It’s little things like that that disappoint you regarding the apps UI.
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Met Office – 5 day forecast
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Met Office – Weather now
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Met Office – Hourly map up close
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Met Office – Rainfall map
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Met Office – Wind direction
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Met Office – Satellite picture
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Met Office – Checking out the place I’m going on holiday!
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Met Office – Widgets
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Met Office – Settings
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Met Office – FAQ
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Met Office – Info
Usefulness:
If you need a highly accurate weather forecast in the UK, you can’t do any better than the Met Office application. It features a wide variety of useful weather info and is simple to use and understand.
Ease of Use:
The app is very simple to use and very intuitive. It takes a little exploration to find your way around, but this is actually an interesting and fun process that tends to lead you into finding other features of the app.
Frequently Used:
If there’s one thing about us Brits it is that we like to talk about the weather. While it’s so ridiculously bad right now, it’s the number one topic of conversation. I check weather apps on a daily basis, always hoping to see the possible end to the ongoing deluge.
Interface:
The UI is really the only thing that lets the app down. It would have looked pretty neat 2 years ago, but on an Ice Cream Sandwich device it looks almost as bad as the weather.