Weather Channel Apps Pass 100 Million Downloads As Weather Stays… Unpredictable

The Weather Channel application on smartphones and tablets now been downloaded more than 100 million times. It’s hardly surprising – Weather globally has been a total basket case for the last couple of years (because there’s no such thing as climate change, right?). Hence, people need an app like this as much as they do in order to deal with, well, let’s see… unseasonably warm “winter-less” winter, tornado outbreaks, record heat, drought, wildfires, Hurricane Isaac in August and Hurricane Sandy in October. By way of comparison, according to app tracker XYO AccuWeather for Android has had 5.6 million downloads, though the Met Office in the UK has garnered around a million on Android.

Available on mobile since 1999, the Weather Channel launched applications in 2007 on iOS and in 2008 on Android, and completely re-designed in May last year, optimising for iOS 6 in September. A Windows Phone app on Nokia Lumia was out in July. And there is now support for up to 40 languages across all major smartphone apps.

It has a monthly average of 38 million users on mobile and six million users on tablet. Naturally, Hurricane Sandy brought record traffic days, beaten over the 2012 holidays with the surge of new devices being activated, says the company, with 137.5 million page views and a No. 2 day record Dec. 25 with 132.4 million page views on December 26.

And The Weather Channel remains perhaps the best known ‘weather brand’ in the U.S., making it the No. 1 weather app and one of the top overall apps on mobile and tablet devices.