Sensecast

Overview

Sensecast is a Greigh Studios product, live on the App Store for iPhone and iPad and on Google Play for Android. It reads live conditions from 18 national weather services and open-data models — and reports not just the numbers but what they do to a person standing outside in them.

It is built in Flutter, with native extensions where the platform rewards them: a live temperature glyph drawn into the Android status bar alongside a Quick Settings tile, home and lock screen widgets on both mobile platforms, and an iOS Live Activity that keeps conditions in the Dynamic Island. The macOS build is live on the Mac App Store; a web build is next.

Problem

Weather apps are confident and opaque in equal measure. They show one forecast without saying whose it is, so the user has no way to know whether the models actually agree. And they report the atmosphere in units — 64°F dew point, 180° wind, 7 UV — that describe physics accurately and human experience not at all.

Both failures have the same shape: the app knows something it declines to explain.

Approach

• Say who is forecasting. A comparison matrix puts NOAA, ECMWF, DWD, Environment Canada, JMA and the UK Met Office side by side, computes a consensus mean, and marks each model's variance from it. Disagreement between models is information, so we show it instead of averaging it away.
• Route to the local authority by default. Rather than pushing one global model everywhere, the smart-routing engine detects location and hands off to the agency that actually models that terrain — MET Norway for fjords, HKO for typhoons, Météo-France's 1.3km AROME grid for Western Europe.
• Translate every metric into a sensation. Dew point becomes crisp, muggy, or tropical. Wind becomes a direction and a Beaufort description. "Feels like" always states its own cause — humidity making it warmer, wind making it cooler — rather than presenting a second number with no provenance.
• Teach on tap, and let it be dismissed. Any metric opens an explanation, with the physics collapsed underneath the plain-language version. A standalone Weather Academy collects 20 searchable topics, and a single switch turns all of it off permanently for users who don't want it.
• Watch the hazards that reach the house. Live tornado touchdowns from the Storm Prediction Center, county-level power outages from federal open data, and earthquake, wildfire and tropical-cyclone trackers sit on the same dashboard as the forecast. Pro adds a unified hazard map and storm verification reports with checkable reference IDs for insurance claims.
• Render the weather, don't illustrate it. The background is a physics-based particle canvas — rain with splash rings, drifting cloud layers, lightning, starfields — synchronised to the actual solar elevation at the user's coordinates. Users who find that busy can choose a flat or OLED-black style instead.
• Free data, no key required. 15 forecast sources are free with no account and no ads; Pro unlocks the 3 flagship supercomputer models. Commercial providers stay opt-in with a user-supplied key.

Outcome

Sensecast is live on the App Store — iPhone, iPad, and Mac — and on Google Play, currently at version 1.1.0 — dashboard with drag-and-drop tile ordering, animated Doppler radar with a two-hour past loop and a ninety-minute nowcast over a dBZ legend, air quality, pollen, aurora Kp index, the full hazard suite, and the complete set of home and lock screen widgets. A test suite covering unit, widget, state and security runs in CI.

The product site at sensecast.app carries the store links, the feature breakdown and its own Weather Academy. The web version is next, with a notify-me list open.