WRAL Weather

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Edit: Haven't looked at this review in a long while so hadn't seen the developer response that "it isn't the intent of WRAL to 'force' anyone to go online to do anything". Sad to say, that part has only gotten worse. The detailed video is what I'm talking about and now you can only get a brief video without going to the Live News and Weather and wait for the ads to play. In a severe weather event the app and WRAL seem to have improved the availability, otherwise I'm likely to miss the video weather - but I can always find it at ABC 11, so I'm good. (End of updated review, May 2019) WRAL weather reporting is good because of the expertise of the the weather staff. This new app is disappointing because it's clear that it intentionally forces users to go to WRAL online to get in depth reporting, especially video reporting (join us at WRAL online for the details'). When you go to WRAL online you get 10 minutes of ads before you can see any report, weather or anything. That's really bad in a severe weather event. I know you have to pay for things, but it's so much that busy people will walk away. Isn't that what a mobile weather app is all about? Busy people turning to a quick look at the weather? Too bad I too often have to miss the details and go to another source for them.

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I miss the old layout of the 7 day forecast. The new version has WAY too many ads. I dislike the fixed portrait orientation and haven’t found a way to adjust it to landscape for my iPad. I also can’t seem to get a good setting on the “special weather bulletin” alerts. I want to know if there is bad weather coming or maybe thick fog in the morning, but I don’t want to get alerts for every time the wind blows or all night long while I’m trying to sleep. I checked the other alerts I want to get, but if there is a special weather statement concerning, say, air quality, and I don’t have “air quality” checked, I still get the alert. The last round of storms we had roll through, I had to finally shut off the audible alerts because they were going off almost every 30 min for lightning advisory updates and flash flood advisories. I don’t need that at 3:00 in the morning, especially since the storm had already passed my area! It would be nice if there was a way to set a schedule for muting non-emergency audible alerts especially if one chooses the special bulletin alerts.

I don’t know how long the new version of the WRAL Weather App has been out, but it updated on my phone late last week. At this point, I’m not favorably impressed. Before on iControl radar, I could see all of my locations pinpointed. Now I see only my current location. I could live with that, but yesterday when I clicked on it, it would either show no precipitation (it was raining at the time), it would not “play” at all, or the precipitation was coming from east of me (it truly wasn’t). Last night during non-stop severe storm alerts I resorted to going to the menu and pulling up Doppler 5000 to see what was coming. Also, the Weather Feed is now on the open screen but to enlarge it to be able to read the graphics, you must go back to the menu and open Weather Feed. From there you can enlarge. Giving 3 stars only because I have confidence that WRAL will improve this product to the point it deserves having the WRAL name on it.

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Not only did the update delete all of my preset locations it also deleted many of the settings. You can no longer see where there is lightning within a storm system and you can no longer see little icons of each of your presets in relationship to each other and the storm. You also can’t control the transparency of the storm system in the iControl feature making it hard to determine where these major storm bands really are! Also, forget about zooming/moving the iControl screen around because it will get stuck in buffer mode and you won’t be able to bring it back without restarting the app. I have always loved this app and it is typically far superior in terms of information compared to any others but this update is disappointing. Edit: I did find a way to adjust the opacity but it doesn’t let you slide the icon and clicking the little dots caused it to freeze. Also, I am unimpressed as I have been reading through other similar complaints that everyone for the last 2 years has received the same response to their concerns.

When I first opened the newly downloaded app it was a blank white screen. I got very frustrated because this was my go-to weather app before the new update. I was getting ready to make a scene but I closed it out and opened it back up and everything worked flawlessly. Glad I didn’t open my big mouth. Lol! It just needed time to download on my phone and I’m very pleased now. If you try to get into parts of the app too fast though it does confuse it a bit. So let it load up before clicking all over the app. Can’t complain though. I was impatient. 😉 There are a LOT of ads. They repeat with every click. If I HAVE to watch ads I’d like them to be tailored to something I’m interested in.