Version 610 is Live for Android

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Version 610 on Android has been submitted for review with the Google Play Store and this brings with it a fix for the notification issues on certain Android devices!

Google has mentioned it may take longer than usual this time of year to get approval so please bear with us. Thank you for your patience!

610 also brings a fix for links in the alert dropdown that go to a browser that can’t be closed. Instead, it’ll open in your default browser.

Apple will also take a while for approval and we’ll get them both out ASAP!

Thank you and Merry Christmas!

Version 609 Live!

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ANDROID USERS: Version 609 should be live now: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details...

APPLE USERS: Version 609 launched earlier this month:

https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/instant-weather/id1495672013

NEW:

- Coloured icons! (Switch back to 1 colour in settings)

- All locations on "Locations" page auto-update condition details!

- Animation on top of "Hours" product

- Snow animation option available in settings (Avoid if your device isn't very fast)

- "Allow Notifications" permission will pop-up immediately for users who have location Services disabled & not just the second time they open the app

- Fix for duplicate "Following" locations

- Other minor bug & performance fixes!

Thank you!! Woohoo!

- Adam, Teresa, & our dev team!

Version 507 is available now

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Big radar improvement available now with version 507! Available for Apple & Android! Much smoother animations!

Download free at: InstantWeatherApp.com

No more radar mixing and/or back-and-forth animation issues. Woohoo!

- Adam

P.S. If you have an older iPad running iOS 12.4 or older, please hold off on the update until we apply a fix for that, coming soon! (Our apologies if you already did and we’ll have a fix ASAP!)

New release plans for next week

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We're preparing to release a new app version by the end of next week!

This release will come with humidity and pressure added to the minute and hourly pages! Woohoo!

We're also working on including by default, Canadian humidex to calculate the "Feels like" temperature in the summer and windchill in the winter. For those who like our 'Feels like' the way it is, you'll be able to change it back to the hybrid version we currently use in the app. This will work for the current condition, minute, and hourly pages.

Several in this community have mentioned they'd like to see more maximum/minimums in the "Day" product dropdown and perhaps "Feels like" in there two. I love the idea but this will likely take us some time so keep on us about it. :D

For those who may not know, you can click on any of the blue bars on the daily product and it will expand with more details such as sunrise/sunset and a text summary of the forecast for day & night.

Stuck alerts have been temporarily addressed but we plan to work on a more comprehensive fix that should mitigate any issues with one part of our system affecting another part as we currently have a couple unnecessary dependencies.

If you've made it this far, you win life. <3

Adam

HUGE upgrade

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Early this morning, we’ll be deploying and testing a HUGE upgrade to our system that we’ve been designing and coding since the app-meltdown on June 10th, when we doubled our user base in only a few hours. This happened because of a severe weather and possible tornado outbreak in southern Ontario. I say “possible” because if only one more tornado is confirmed, we’ll have reached the minimum number of tornadoes to be classified as a “Tornado Outbreak”; 6.

We’ve already upgraded our servers quickly to bandaid the issue and this allowed us to work great during several large events in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba. This was put to the test in southern Ontario today with widespread alerts and big stress on our servers but thankfully, our bandaid fixes held on!

Long story longer, I’m super excited for the upgrades today!! If all goes well (and we should probably do a big notification test to make sure), we will now automatically deploy an infinite number of servers to handle any level of traffic the app receives for all major processes.

Sunday looks possibly severe in southern Ontario and that’s what we’ve been preparing for. What’s a good time for a notification test? 🥰

Adam

BIG SERVER UPGRADES

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You have may have noticed notifications coming in even faster than before and that's just the first step! We're working extensively this week on major server upgrades for all aspects of our free app Instant Weather.

Wednesday's significant weather in Ontario was an eyeopener at how quickly we can grow as we doubled our app user base in only a few hours. 😳 Wow. However, the first impression of our app for so many of those new users was a spinning loading wheel... sigh...

Saturday was the first big test since Wednesday when Alberta (our second largest community in Canada) had a severe weather outbreak and the app performed incredibly fast the entire time even with a boatload of app downloads! This was due to some initial server upgrades but we're not done there! We have big plans to add load-balancing and auto-scaling servers for all aspects of our system so that no matter how many new users join the app during any given event, it'll remain stable and fast for everyone.

If a spinning wheel was your first impression of our app, we sincerely hope you give it another chance as it's working great now and we're working very hard to ensure it can rock'n'roll during the next big weather event. Thank you.

- Adam #TimeToScale

P.S. To download our FREE app, please visit http://InstantWeatherApp.com and choose Apple or Android.

Upgrading to RN

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Hi! Now that Instant Updates™ and some major server updates are completed, we have one more server upgrade to finish and then we’re going full blast with our plan to upgrade to the React Native platform! RN is what Facebook and many other world-class apps are built upon.

Some reasons for this are, it loads extremely fast, not just on iOS like our current app but also on Android. It makes it much easier to create a comprehensive widget which is a big priority. It allows us to use Apple Maps on iOS as well as a more stable version of Google Maps on both platforms. It allows us to mix with other unique mapping platforms down the road which would allow us to bring back cool features like 3D radar. And last but certainly not least, a few of the remaining device-specific bugs would likely be solved by simply switching platforms.

Thankfully, we built the current app using React JS (through Cordova) and this means, half the work of switching platforms is already done! Another huge benefit to originally building the app in Cordova is that we can launch the website version very soon! 🙂

Exciting times! Thank you so much for making this possible!! ❤

Adam