Apple's Weather App Went Down Pushing One App's Downloads 566% Up

Ariel Ariel
4/7/23

This is a single insight from This Week in Apps - End of an Era. Check out the full article for more insights.


It's not every day that Apple's services crash, but this week they did and it was epic. Almost every day since the weekend Apple's built-in weather app showed no data to someone around the world.

People still need their weather, so instead of waiting for Apple, people headed to the App Store to resolve the issue on their own!

Although downloads for a few weather apps rose this week, The Weather Channel saw the highest increase, growing 566% and hitting the highest day of downloads this year and the second-highest since 2020.

Number-wise, that growth translates to roughly 80K new downloads on top of the expected downloads, according to our estimates.

I don't expect this wave to continue as Apple fixes its back end, but it's interesting to see how responsive users are to something like weather.

If you're a developer of a weather app, that means there's still room to grow in this category. Take advantage of this by optimizing your app.

App Intelligence for Everyone!

The insights in this report come right out of our App Intelligence platform, which offers access to download and revenue estimates, installed SDKs, and more! Learn more about the tools or schedule a demo with our team to get started.

Are you a Journalist? You can get access to our app and market intelligence for free through the Appfigures for Journalists program. Contact us for more details.

All figures included in this report are estimated. Unless specified otherwise, estimated revenue is always net, meaning it's the amount the developer earned after Apple and Google took their fee.

Tagged: #weather

Related Resources

Peacock Is Riding the Winter Olympics Straight to 100 Million Downloads
Insights
Peacock Is Riding the Winter Olympics Straight to 100 Million Downloads

The Winter Olympics are pushing Peacock toward a major milestone. But the real story is how NBC's streaming app doubled its revenue while Disney's apps went the other way.

The Most Predictable Spike in the App Store
Insights
The Most Predictable Spike in the App Store

Every year, one app quietly takes over the App Store charts for a few days. It's not a game, not a social network, and not AI. Here's what's behind the spike.