Why you can trust our reporting
We covered the initial announcement of the CNN Weather app last May, and regularly report on free weather apps and climate-related streaming channels, including competing products like AccuWeather and Fox Weather. We also downloaded, registered for and tested the CNN Weather app, and compared it to similar products like Fox Weather and the built-in weather app for iPhone.
Warner Bros Discovery’s (WBD) cable news outlet CNN has launched its free weather app for smartphones, about a year after the network first announced the app’s development.
The app, available for free in the Apple app store, will offer regular weather forecasts combined with on-the-ground reporting from CNN’s team of meteorologists and reporters, the company said in a statement on Tuesday.
Users who download the app must first register an account with CNN, or log in to an account already used to access the network’s website and streaming products, including CNN All Access. That puts the app in a different category compared to other free weather forecast services like AccuWeather and Fox Weather, which don’t require users to create an account before seeing current conditions and future forecasts.
But CNN says its weather app is not like the rest: It’s positioned as a “lifestyle” service, one of many that the company is building as it works to differentiate its news offerings beyond cable television.
“We are creating this portfolio of lifestyle products to help our audience navigate a complex world,” Ben French, the Senior Vice President of New Business at CNN, said in a statement. “CNN Weather will not only prepare people each morning for the day ahead and keep them safe and informed during severe weather events, it will also help our audience appreciate and understand the natural weather phenomena around them.”
In a blog post on CNN’s website, CNN Weather Senior Director Angela Fritz said most people already have a default weather app on their phones, plus other apps that provide live radar updates and “others that give you 47 data points before your morning coffee.”
While that data can be helpful, Fritz said context is just as important — and CNN aims to deliver that context through its app (remember: registration required!) since weather “changes a lot, without notice or explanation.”
“A good forecast can tell you what might happen,” Fritz noted. “A good weather app should help you understand that forecast, how confident you should be in it, and what to do with that information, so you only need one.”
Fritz said the app will be an ongoing development, one that evolves with the needs of its users.
“We aren’t under any delusion that the first version checks all the boxes, but it’s a good start,” she said.
Fritz took a swipe at competitors who have comparable weather products in the market: “We aren’t going to go live every time it rains,” she said, promising that the network’s live coverage will only spin up “when weather is, or could be, actually impactful.”
By comparison, CNN Weather’s main competitor, Fox Weather, offers live coverage on a near-24 hour basis, with uninterrupted weather reports during climate-related emergencies like hurricanes, tornadoes and severe thunderstorms. AccuWeather and WeatherNation, two other free streaming weather networks, have also started offering live coverage of climate emergencies over the past few years.
But CNN is hoping its approach to contextual weather will set it apart from the rest — not just providing current conditions, wind speeds and the barometric pressure, but helping audiences who aren’t fluent in meteorology lingo actually understand what is going on around them and what could happen next.
Viewed through that lens, it starts to explain why CNN Weather is positioned as a “lifestyle” app — CNN Weather isn’t something that people are expected to check on a daily basis. Instead, it’s a service that someone opens when they’re planning a trip to another city and need to know what to pack, or when they’re trying to decide what outfits to wear for the rest of the week.
But if you want to know when it will stop raining — well, you’ll probably have to look elsewhere.
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Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story said the CNN Weather app is available as a free download in the Apple and Google app stores. The app is available in the Apple app store, but not yet available in the Google Play Store.
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