This Is the Best Free Weather App for Windows

Windows doesn't come with a weather application the way macOS and mobile operating systems do. Sure, the widget area shows the weather, but it also summons news headlines from the very bowels of internet hell and requires that you open a web browser page full of ads to get more details.

If you want a clean, ad-free, and beautiful way to check the weather on Windows I recommend Lively Weather. This is a free and open source native-to-Windows application (by developer Dani John) with complete weather forecasts. It also features beautifully rendered background animations that reflect the current weather conditions.

You can search for any city on Earth to see the weather: Tthe main summary shows up at the top of the screen, and below that sits a seven-day overview alongside a timeline of conditions. There are also boxes for the UV index, sunrise and sunset, humidity, wind, air quality, pressure, visibility, cloud coverage, and total precipitation. Click any day in the seven-day overview and all of these boxes will populate with forecasted conditions. You can also click any box to see more details.

Credit: Justin Pot

This is, for me, more than enough information about the weather to make choices about my wardrobe and transportation. The only obvious thing missing is radar, which is admittedly a feature some people rely on.

You can choose between imperial and metric in the settings. You can also choose a weather provider: Open-Meteo, OpenWeatherMap, and Qweather (China) are all supported.

Finally, you can choose the quality of the visuals. It's recommended that you stick with lower if you don't have a dedicated GPU, which is an absurd sentence to type about a weather application. When you see the backgrounds, though, it makes sense. These are dynamic animations for conditions ranging from sun to rain to snow to lightning, all rendered behind the transparent boxes that offer the actual weather information.

It's pretty, is what I'm saying, and there are even ambient sounds reflecting the weather condition (though I might suggest opening your window instead).

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