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The built-in Weather app on your iPhone works just fine. In fact, I feel as if it’s become more and more accurate over the years. But too often I find its forecasts aren’t perfect – especially where rain is concerned – and the experience isn’t always the most intuitive either. Particularly when I’m looking ahead, it can be difficult to quickly move between different locations when I’m travelling, too.
There are lots of weather apps that can bring you a better-to-use and nicer-looking experience, but it’s not always easy to find a weather app that looks good and is functional without bombarding me with a whole load of meteorological information. Who knew wanting to know whether it’ll be sunny tomorrow or not would be such a tricky task, right?
Well, I’ve just spent the past few weeks travelling through Spain and I’ve been really enjoying using the Mercury Weather app. In many ways, the Mercury Weather app isn’t all that unique. It looks and behaves like most other weather apps, but to me everything about Mercury Weather is a little simpler, a little more refined and a little more enjoyable than its rivals.
Why Mercury Weather is my new favorite weather app
The app looks lovely, with an ombre effect in the background of the main dashboard. You’ll then see a detailed weather report for your current location, but not with all kinds of info you won’t need, just with key stats about the temperature, what the temperature feels like, an hourly forecast for the next 24-hours and a forecast for the next week, too.
Scroll down and you’ll see information about the UV index, cloud coverage, humidity levels, wind and expected rainfall. If you get a kick out of seeing the sunrise and sunset each day too, like me (cloud permitting), then you’ll also find that information here as well.
Tap the little magnifying glass in the top right of the screen and you can search for locations and see a list of ones you’ve searched for recently. You can also set a home location within the app — this automatically gets added to your list of locations while you’re travelling, but then gets hidden when you’re back home.
As someone who spends a lot of time travelling, I also like that within the premium version of the app you can save weather info about an unlimited number of locations and there’s a feature called Trip Forecast. This allows you to add all your upcoming trips and travel plans so you can see what the weather’s going to be like – a great way to motivate you if you’re living in a country where the weather sucks and want to count down the days until you’re in the sunshine.
Otherwise, you don’t need the premium version of Mercury Weather to enjoy the basics. But if you did want to pay the $14.99/£14.99 subscription fee, you’ll also get access to lock screen widgets, which show you details about your current location without the need to even unlock your phone.
Weather nerds will also like that the premium version unlocks historical data about the weather across any location, ideal if you want to plan your next trip.
Mercury Weather looks nice, is slick to use and only serves up the most important information. It's been really handy for me as I've been travelling, but I also consider it an everyday essential app now too.
