Yahoo's stupid-gorgeous Weather app launches on Android

Yahoo’s mobile design team is to be commended. The company’s insanely pretty Weather app has finally made the jump over to Android.

Yahoo Weather first launched on iOS back in April. As we noted in our review then, the designers’ use of full-screen images from Flickr really made all the difference in turning a ho-hum utility app into a showstopper.

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By using images from the Flickr community to show weather conditions around the world, the Weather app can now illustrate in glorious, full-screen color, the weather that’s happening outside your doors. The result is amazingly fresh and very much in stride with the apps mobile-first companies are releasing right now.

Here’s a look at the new Android app:

“You’re going to see us do a lot more things that are visual, rich, and have engagement that’s absolutely delightful,” said Yahoo emerging products director Marco Wirasinghe in a recent interview on the Weather app’s design changes.

“It’s more than charts and numbers; it’s about places you’ve been, places where you have family. It’s connected to emotion, and visually, we can get to that connection faster than any other format,” he continued.

“The idea [for using Flickr photos] came from internal meetings,” Wirasinghe said. “We were looking for something to do with Weather. It’s the most profound daily activity on a smartphone, but we didn’t have an experience that made it really shine. We asked, what would be delightful and what do people really want?”

We’re hoping to see more of this kind of design innovation from Yahoo in the near future. Today, however, the company is rolling out a new desktop tool — a browser toolbar. Our first reaction was “Yikes,” but we’ll see if the design brains behind apps like Weather can still deliver on an old-school format like toolbars.