AfterDawn: Tech news

How The Weather Channel knocked Yahoo Weather off the iPhone

Written by Andre Yoskowitz @ 22 Jun 2014 12:53

How The Weather Channel knocked Yahoo Weather off the iPhone Earlier this month, at Apple's annual WWDC, the company made a low-profile announcement that The Weather Channel would be replacing Yahoo Weather as the default weather application for iOS 8.
Yahoo had long held the spot, and the partnership led to a ton of traffic coming back to Yahoo and its portal so the loss will certainly have repercussions. In fact, a recent update of the app was highly touted by CEO Marissa Mayer and has seen strong reviews.

Quite ironically, the Yahoo Weather app has always been powered by Weather Channel data. Yahoo polished the user interface but the technical and important data came directly from Weather Channel servers. The new deal was engineered by Weather Channel CEO David Kenny, who was also a former Yahoo board of directors member and who clearly saw a large opportunity.

In their updated app, The Weather Channel has added more technology and information including better weather related to current locations, a full nine-day forecast, a weather-conditions summary and even more details. The move should prove to be a huge gain for TWC.



Perhaps even more importantly for Yahoo, the new deal shows that there is a way onto iOS, and many in the industry are scared that Yahoo's stock app will be the next to get supplanted. Other stock market app providers, especially Bloomberg, have been really juicing up their iPad and iPhone apps and are quite popular.

Yahoo knows it must keep its mobile partnerships alive if it wants to survive. The company does not have any hardware, and sees nearly all of its traffic from apps that lead back to its portal including finance, sports, search, and much more.

Source:
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