Atmos Weather is a free, open-source and community-driven application designed to work on all major desktop OSes out there (including almost all Linux distributions) as well as on Android.
It’s heavily focused on making the user experience as good as possible, hence, you’re in full control of your weather forecast and alerts, the GUI is clean, the privacy is solid, and there’s no “bloatware” associated with it.
This “full control” is probably the best thing about the application, as you’re provided with multiple locations to receive alerts from. You can also choose the priority and the alert type for each individual location.
The information about weather warnings and forecasts is brought to you thanks to the National Weather Service API, as well as the Nominatim API.
According to the developer, the “alerts should be given within one minute of being published to the NWS API.”
I like that Atmos Weather seems like a passion project for the developer and the group of volunteers working on it, and I also like that it upholds most of the fundamental open-source principles quite nicely.
Be that as it may, it’s no perfect. For starters, because the app uses the National Weather Service API, it means that this is an app mostly aimed US citizens or people who are mainly interested in tracking the weather across the United States.
I’m going to quote the app’s website for a bit – “Atmos Weather is the ultimate lightweight weather forecast and alert app.” Don’t get me wrong, Atmos Weather is a great little app for what it is, but I wouldn’t necessarily call it lightweight. After all, we’re dealing with an Electron-based app, which are notoriously “not lightweight.”
Since we’re on the subject, I have to also mention the fact the notification don’t always work on Linux (most Linux distros lack the components for Electron notification support).
Depending on how you choose to see it, Atmos Weather is either a very interesting project or a mediocre application based on various usability limitations (being only available for US) and on the fact that’s built using web technologies.
Either way, if you’re looking for a nice open-source app for your Android phone or desktop, and you’re interested in tracking the weather forecast in the US, then by all means, give Atmos Weather a quick try.
