Press Kit

Oscar° is a free weather app for Apple devices with forecasts from national weather services, live rain radar and official warnings, without ads or tracking.

In September 2020, iOS 14 brought widgets to the iPhone. I wanted a rain radar on my Home Screen, and the only app that had one cost money. So I sat down, started learning Swift and built my own. The first version of Oscar° was just that widget. Its radar image came from a small server that took screenshots of a web map, because I couldn’t get anything better to work yet.

When Apple later rebuilt its Weather app on Dark Sky’s technology, its forecasts for Germany became noticeably less reliable for me. That’s when the widget turned into a full weather app. Over the years I’ve gone through countless designs and several data providers, from OpenWeatherMap to Open-Meteo and the national weather services. Since 2026 a good part of Oscar° runs on a weather server I wrote myself. It stitches together radar from six national networks, calculates its own nowcasts and storm tracks, turns raw weather model data into map layers and sends out the notifications.

The forecasts themselves still come mostly through Open-Meteo, a great open-source project that makes the data of national weather services easy to use. That data is paid for by the public, yet many weather apps put it behind ads, tracking or a subscription. I want Oscar° to stay free, because a weather report shouldn’t be a privilege.

I build Oscar° alone, in my spare time, in Leipzig, and pay the running costs myself. If you want to chip in, there’s a tip jar in the app, with a few extra app icons and stickers as a thank-you.

Oscar° is a weather app for Apple devices, built on open data from national weather services like DWD, Météo-France and NOAA.

It shows the forecast hour by hour for the next two days and day by day for twelve, with every hour available in detail: temperature, rain, wind, humidity, pressure, clouds and soil moisture. An ensemble view shows how certain the forecast is. Live rain radar covers most of Europe, the US, Taiwan and Brazil, with a two-hour nowcast and storm cell tracking. When rain is on its way, Oscar° sends a notification, and while it rains the Lock Screen shows how heavy it is and when it should stop.

Map layers for rain, temperature, wind and pressure play forward hour by hour, using DWD’s ICON-D2 for Central Europe and ECMWF for the rest of the world. Official warnings come straight from the weather services in Europe, the US, Canada and Taiwan. Air quality, pollen, UV, a warming-stripes climate view, widgets and an Apple Watch app round it out.

Oscar° is free and has no ads, no tracking and no account.

• Hourly forecast for 48 hours, daily forecast for 12 days
• Hourly detail view with charts for every metric
• Ensemble forecasts that show how certain the forecast is
• 17 forecast models to pick from, or an automatic pick for your location
• Readings from nearby weather stations
• Live rain radar with a two-hour nowcast and storm cell tracking (most of Europe, US, Taiwan, Brazil, Canary Islands)
• Rain notifications and a Live Activity on the Lock Screen and in the Dynamic Island
• Map layers for rain, temperature, wind and pressure, plus Meteosat satellite images every 15 minutes
• Official weather warnings for Europe, the US, Canada and Taiwan, optionally as notifications
• Air quality, pollen (Europe) and UV index
• Warming stripes: today’s date in every year since 1940
• Widgets for the Home Screen and Lock Screen
• Apple Watch app with complications

Forecasts, ensembles, air quality and climate history: Open-Meteo (CC BY 4.0). Radar: DWD, EUMETNET (OPERA), NOAA (MRMS), CWA, REDEMET, AEMET. Warnings: DWD, Meteoalarm, NWS, Environment Canada, CWA. Satellite: EUMETSAT. Global model: ECMWF. Maps: OpenStreetMap contributors, OpenFreeMap.