The Last Thing the World Needed Was Another Weather App

WeatherGlow at Carter Road, Bandra

How it started

A couple of years ago, my wife, my mother-in- law and I were taking a trip to Delhi to celebrate my MILs 60th birthday. The Mumbai to Delhi flight is long. About 2.5 hours. So I made sure to download a couple of episodes and a movie as a backup to make sure I avoided time with my thoughts with no internet. As a backup to my backup, I carried my Switch so I could play games as well.

What I didn’t know was my wife was busy buying books on Amazon so she could read them on the flight. As we sat down, she rejected my ideas of watching things, snatched the iPad and started reading.

As I looked out to the skies, I decided to forgo the Switch (sorry Zelda) and instead embrace the boredom. How rare it is to find yourself with nothing to do and no one to disturb you.

I decided to borrow my wife’s notebook and just sit with my thoughts. I asked myself what is it that I’d genuinely like to build, not for money, or to enhance my portfolio for my next job, but something that would be fun to build solely for me.

Before I could complete my thought, I wanted to check the weather in Delhi. I wanted to check my saved location’s weather information. The app didn’t load, so I checked my other app, still nothing. As I was on flight mode, nothing was loading.

The rarity and privilege of the situation was quickly losing its novelty. I kept wondering why none of these apps have a flight mode option where the data will be locally persisted and there was my “aha” moment!

The first concept on a flight to Delhi

A weather app! I wanted to build my own weather app. I always loved using weather apps, a habit my wife loved to make fun of. As we were both from Mumbai, we only knew two climate conditions. It was either hot or it was raining. And it was always humid.

The more I thought about it and started sketching my ideas for it, self doubt began to spread. It wasn’t like the app store was running a shortage of weather apps, I had, like, 7 on my phone itself. I started thinking if I would get any users or even the fact that there is any feature people would pay for. Before I could spiral out, I had to tell myself, did it even matter anyway? Not everything needed to be productive or worth monetizing it, this was something I was building for fun and to expand my skillset.

All throughout the flight, I kept sketching the wireframe for every section and screen.

This was already so much fun. Back then when Vincent Van Gogh was looking out of the asylum after his mental breakdown and he painted the visuals with his imagination, he was not looking to be famous, he was just expressing his emotional turmoil in the form of art. Was I doing the same? Probably?

But I liked the view outside my flight window, it looked like I was floating above a map with clouds over it and there was my another “aha” moment!

I wanted to show the location map of the user with a weather overlay on it. It had to give that looking from a glass window feeling to it. I liked how the sun in the sky was creating this glowing tint on my window and that was my third “aha” moment (I swear this might be the last one).

I want a glow on top of the app that represents the sun and during night time, it will have a moonlight glow. I wanted this to be the core design of my app. While I was having all these break through moments on the flight, my wife was sitting next to me and reading a book. She was calmly nodding at me whenever I showed her my sketch with my hyper excited energy. It is true love, indeed.

So, what happened?

So I started building in public, this was before the AI slopfest and the progress was slow and steady. I had finalized the main design theme of looking out of the window on flight (back in 2023) with weather data overlay on it. Not just static data, but something that adapts with the moment.

Testing the bare bones weather layout in Delhi

Every section, every detail has been designed to respond to the time of day, to reflect the changing atmosphere, not just report it. That is my end goal.

[embed]

So I started building in public, this was before the AI (remember?) and the progress was slow and steady.

I kept diligently building in public and liking other projects that indie devs were working on. It felt great to have that sense of community where you could see what others were working on and a chance to share your work as well and get genuine feedback. Until I noticed that one of the developers I was following on Twitter had started copying my design.

[embed]

It felt so weird to watch my work getting ripped off. I didn’t know how to process it, do I make a big fuss or let it be? Maybe he wasn’t doing it on purpose. It bothered me that someone was out there plagiarizing my so-called “masterpiece” and I was supposed to be okay with it.

[embed]My last post on India vs Pakistan match day

What I felt was defeated. I had worked hard, and it didn’t even matter. I tried to keep working on my project but it felt so heavy to do so, and hence never ended up releasing it.

[embed]

The Rebirth (2025)

Towards the end of 2025 my wife was discussing what resolutions she should keep for 2026. She was reviewing her old resolutions and telling me about all the stuff she ended up doing. When we were reviewing mine, there it was. Publish my app before my birthday. A resolution that was always being carried forward year after year.

My wife suggested maybe that’s the problem. Since I was born on December 31st, I had an entire year to do something and kept putting it off. Maybe this time, I can have a more definite timeline. Publish my app by March 2026. Another year, same resolution.

That discussion changed something in me.

I didn’t want to add to it my resolutions and see myself keep pushing it year after year. So I decided, this birthday I will give myself the best gift. I will try and publish my app before December 31st.

A lot of things were happening in my life and the only thing keeping me sane was coding. I kept building the app, I had to refactor a lot of code as Swift 6.2 made a lot of updates to concurrency and made asynchronous and concurrent code easier to write, but with a slight learning curve. I kept working on it every single day and night. This was more difficult as the AI slopfest was peaking with random people “vibe coding” endless habit trackers and chatGPT wrappers with endless Image generators.

[embed]

There was so much noise around but this time I was determined to release it and even a seven nation army won’t be able to hold me back now.

I massively restructured the architecture and it started by adding a shared environment object that holds all weather related data including forecasts, hourly conditions, and location based updates. Once I injected this object into the SwiftUI environment, every view can access the same source of truth without prop drilling or tightly coupling components. This was such a massive win to finally see your code work the way you had visualized it.

I was ready to release the app, but then came the final boss level of app release, “App Store Optimization”.

I tried to shortcut the app store screenshots by using basic web apps, but they were ugly and gave generic output but also had a paywall. Then I pivoted to Figma templates and they were also boring and ugly. I decided to make my own template that I can use and customize before every update. This took me another 2 days as I kept learning about ASO stuff and how to use the keywords in the screenshot and somehow not overdo it too.

It’s the launch day?

It was December 30th, 2025. This is it. Everything was ready but I still had that urge to add more things, fix more things, polish more things, but no! It was a hard stop to all that and just focus on launch. I was still obsessing over the App Icon which I doubt anyone would notice all the details. But I was doing it for myself.

The idea behind the app icon was to build my own icon and it should somehow represent that time in sky when you see both the sun and moon together in the sky. I wanted that visual image, so I made a cloud layer first and made the sun and moon peek from behind it and with the glass effect it looked really good. The light see through glow of the sun and moon seen through the cloud! Absolute cinema! That’s it, I am ready, I can do this! I published it and then comes the waiting part. I remember last year during the holiday season the App Store review team was super slow in approving apps and it might take a long time. 31st December passed by with me checking the App Store connect constantly and waiting on a miracle. Then came 1st Jan, 2nd Jan, 3rd Jan, 4th Jan, 5th Jan, 6th Jan and after more than a week of nothing, I was just patiently waiting for something to give as I walk through this tedious path I’ve chosen.

[embed]If there were no rewards to reap No loving embrace to see me through This tedious path I’ve chosen here I certainly would’ve walked away

On January 9th the sun was shining a bit brighter, the sky was bright blue, the birds were happy, the crows were singing, the flowers were smiling, it was a nice beautiful day as finally my app got approved and was live in the App Store.

It felt good to see my name in the App Store.

My strength has always been consistency and I wanted to showcase it in this app with frequent updates. I trying to push one update every 2 weeks. I’ve gotten good feedback from the users (300+ users so far) and I’ve planned an iPad app, widget support and finally my favourite WatchOS app. This release was a drop in the ocean with all the things I have planned which keep executing in time. Thank you to the all 2 readers for reading this. I’ll be pushing an article every time I release an update and keep you all part of this app building journey of mine.

My app is called WeatherGlow and you can check it out on the App Store

[embed]WeatherGlow - Local Forecast App - App Store Download WeatherGlow - Local Forecast by Mayur Patil on the App Store. See screenshots, ratings and reviews, user tips…apps.apple.com