What do you want in a weather app – except for it to tell you it’ll be summer sunshine for the foreseeable future? Bare bones or full detail? Accurate for now, or fanciful predictions?  

Given the current seasonable, but surprising, hot weather, we had a look at some of the most popular ones around to see what’s on offer.

The Weather Channel

This is one of the better-looking apps out of those we tested. The home screen is nice and simple, limited to saying: ‘sunny (with icon), feels like 29 degrees, dry conditions will continue’. All a quick browser really needs to know. But the box also expands to include more of the geeky weather stuff – visibility, humidity, dew point, sunrise and sunset.

The top tabs are limited to ‘now’, ‘maps’, ‘videos’ and ‘forecast’, of which this is the only app to brave it to looking 10 days ahead. The video page is a little out of sync with the rest of the app, showing tornado videos from the Weather Channel’s broadcast content, in case you have time to stick around… This tab is also listed ahead of the 10-day forecast content, which has to be one of the main reasons you’re here? 

This is the only app to perform an automatic takeover of your phone’s status bar, with a current temperature icon appearing in the top corner. All you need to do is drag down to see a condensed weather update. It keeps the company front of mind, but might be a bit overbearing given it doesn’t require an opt-in. But, after all, this is an ad-funded app, and not all the best ads at that judging by some of the ones I saw today. Banner ad disguised as links to Facebook and Whatsapp, really offering £1.50 per week premium services…

The Weather Channel’s apps have seen more than 100m downloads to date.

BBC Weather

The BBC launched its own weather app a couple of months ago and it is pretty nice to behold. The organisation has stuck with the same icons we are used to from its TV forecasts and offers the bare minimum in terms of detail.

The BBC has the joy of being licence fee funded, which means it is ad-free and this could make all the difference to people who are downloading a weather app for the first time.

All of the information is all contained in one simple home screen, with a small carousel embedded at the bottom to give you a little info about the next five days, and another halfway down to give you detail by the hour for rest of the day. Get this app if you want the high/low, sun/cloud/rain and perhaps the wind speed and direction. Both the BBC and the Weather Channel use GPS to geo-locate your forecast.

The app saw 1m downloads in just two weeks and the app has increased the BBCs total mobile traffic from 20 per cent to 25 per cent.

Accuweather

Accuweather comes preloaded on Android, which isn’t a bad deal for the company at all. The widget offers a five-day forecast and international map feature.

But more fool you if you decide to go and get the real Accuweather app. Although the font and design is nice enough, given the dry topic and amount of detail, the app has two navigation bars with the same links to the same content running in tandem. Confusing. And you can either have your temperature in Farenheit and your distances in miles, or degrees Celcius paired with metres. And never the twain shall mix.

It too has links to video content, with today’s report starting, rather handily, with the whole of North America. It offers more in the way of detail – with weather for now, hourly and daily, along with maps and news. It also has options to see how the weather might be for hunting game, going fishing or doing exercise, as well as the how the weather might be affecting your respiratory health. It was the only app the have weather-specific ads, with Benedryl being advertised today.

Apparently there is some chance that it will rain in London on Wednesday. But only Accuweather has the balls to tell us. 

Met Office 

The ad-free Met Office app, as you could probably have guessed, looks a bit less sexy, or a bit more like an Action Man toy, than the rest. Complete with clashing hues of fluorescent green and orange.

 With this app, you can actually see a full map of the UK with the forecast for the day, how it will change over the coming hours, and toggle different weather conditions like cloud, temperature and rain. But the navigation to find your five-day forecast is a bit poorly signposted. 

Sky News Weather

The Sky News Weather app looks pretty simple but is surprisingly inaccessible given the simplicity with which it can tackle news events.

After the current temperature, the second measure I’m sure you’re all dying to know is the dew point, which is surely why it has been given such a prime position. 

Weather lovers, you can leave your barometer at home if you’re using this app, as wind pressure also makes it into the necessary for mobile user on-the-go pile, along with the acronym VRB – which, as we all know, stands for variable wind.

The infinite scroll to see the five-day forecast is also pretty unsophisticated and could go unnoticed. But the channel has managed to get some premium advertisers on its banners at the bottom.