Image: Dmitry Makeev, CC BY-SA 4.0/Wikimedia Commons and D. Griffin Jones/Cult of Mac
Apple’s Weather app for iPhone, iPad and Mac will soon incorporate local news sourced from the Apple News service. In the latest beta of iOS 16.2, certain cities have an additional section between the ten-day forecast and the air quality meter for weather news. On iPadOS and macOS Ventura, this section occupies an even larger widget in the corner.
The news section isn’t a permanent fixture. From what beta testers have ascertained, it only appears in major cities and only when Apple News finds a relevant story about the weather. If the city has a severe weather alert issued by the National Weather Service (like for flash floods, a bad thunderstorm or a blizzard) at the very top, the news section won’t appear.
Apple appears to be carefully testing this feature — it seems very flippant as to whether it’ll show up or not.
Screenshot: D. Griffin Jones/Cult of Mac
Apple’s new Weather app, introduced in iOS 15, brought a top-to-bottom new modular design that uses SwiftUI that was widely praised. It also added a precipitation radar map, a long-requested feature.
This year, the widget-like design worked well when scaling up the interface for the iPad and the Mac. Apple also added detailed graphs — you can tap on any day, any metric or any section of the app to see a nice pop-up view more information on a timeline.
Screenshot: D. Griffin Jones/Cult of Mac
Unfortunately, Apple has been pushing Apple News features into many of its stock apps — namely, the Stocks app. Rumors suggest Apple is working on adding editorial content to Maps, and yes, it’ll bring ads in with it.
Apple’s drive to push News content in other parts of the system could be in response to reports that publishers are unhappy with the performance of the news platform. The trouble is that even paid readers are unhappy with it, too.
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