BBC Weather app launches for iPhone and Android smartphones

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Free app now available in the UK, going head-to-head with Yahoo, Met Office and other independent apps

The BBC has been criticised in the past for seeming to favour Apple's iOS over Google's Android when launching new mobile apps. Its latest release, BBC Weather, is available on both platforms from launch.

The free smartphone app is available in the UK for iPhone and for Android, offering weather forecasts up to five days ahead, as well as information on UV, pollen count, wind speed and humidity.

It looks the same across iPhone and Android, although the latter version comes with a homescreen widget and the ability to share locations with other devices via NFC, to take advantage of features that aren't available on iOS. Both versions include accessibility features for text-to-speech users.

According to the BBC, it has seen a "huge increase" in people accessing its weather services from mobile devices in the last year, which spurred its decision to develop native apps to sit alongside its existing mobile-optimised website.

"We know that our audiences really want that at-a-glance forecast when they're out and about, with the option of digging for further detail when they need or want to," says BBC Weather head Liz Howell in a statement. "That's exactly what we've delivered, squeezing in all of our trusted data into an app that's simple to use and looks fantastic."

The BBC Weather app faces plenty of competition on iOS and Android, though. Yahoo launched its Yahoo Weather iPhone app in April 2013, pulling in photographs of different weather conditions in locations around the world from its Flickr photography community.

Popular apps are also available for both iOS and Android from the UK's Met Office, The Weather Channel, AccuWeather and WeatherBug, among other developers.

One thing missing from the BBC Weather app – for now at least – is video. The app does not stream weather reports broadcast on its TV and news channels, focusing instead on the pure forecast data. BBC Weather's Carol Kirkwood appears in the promo video for the new app, but not within the app itself.

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