Only show what's actionable right now.
Ovrvue is a weather app that answers one question before anything else: what is the weather about to do to you?
Open OvrvueFree. No account. Works on your phone's home screen.
The idea
Most weather apps open with a screen full of numbers. Dew point, UV index, barometric pressure, a ten-day outlook, three panels of advertising. All of it is technically weather, and almost none of it changes what you do in the next hour.
Ovrvue starts from the opposite end. The first screen shows the temperature, whether it's about to rain, and anything genuinely worth knowing today — a storm closing in, air quality worth staying inside for, gusts that will take your patio umbrella. If nothing is notable, nothing appears. An empty screen is the honest answer to a quiet day.
Everything else still exists. It's one tap away, deliberately.
What you see first
Rain, minute by minute
"Rain starting in 12 minutes." A chart of the next hour that appears when something is falling and hides itself completely when nothing is. Tap through to live radar.
Radar centred on you
Not a regional map you have to find yourself on — a view built around your location, with a crosshair marking exactly where you're standing. Coastlines, lakes and major rivers underneath so you can tell at a glance whether that cell is over the lake or over your street. Each frame is stamped with how old it is, so you can see not just where the rain is but how fast it's moving.
Signals worth acting on
Up to three at a time, ordered by how much they matter. A storm and its distance, poor air quality, wildfire smoke, damaging gusts, low visibility, ice. Past three it stops being a signal and becomes a wall of data.
A week you can read in a glance
Each day is a bar showing its temperature range against the rest of the week, with the chance of rain filling that same bar. Warmer, cooler, wetter, drier — visible without reading a single number. Flip the whole week to a 24-hour condition band when you'd rather see the shape of the day.
Honest timestamps
When the data was fetched, and when the weather model behind it actually ran. Those are two different times, and only one of them tells you how current the forecast really is.
What's one tap away
Feels-like, humidity, dew point, pressure trend, wind and gusts, cloud cover, UV, visibility, sunrise and sunset, moon phase, storm potential, expected rain and snow accumulation, hour-by-hour detail for any day, and how today compares to yesterday.
None of it is on the first screen. All of it is there when you want it.
A heads-up, when it's worth one
Ovrvue can leave a quiet note in your phone's notification shade when notable weather is on the way — real snow, strong storms, ice, heavy rain, damaging wind, extreme UV. It's called Event Watch, it ships switched off, and you pick which kinds of weather are worth hearing about. It stays silent about the rest.
It exists because of a gap the app creates for itself. Checking the weather takes three seconds, and in three seconds nobody scrolls down to Thursday. A light drizzle and a serious storm look much the same from the top of the screen. The note is how the app tells you about the day you were never going to look at.
It has an unusual limitation that turns out to be the best thing about it. Ovrvue has no server, so it genuinely cannot check the weather while you aren't looking. It works out what's coming the moment you open the app, and leaves the note behind for you to find later. Which means it can never wake you at 3am and can never buzz you for the sake of it — it only ever speaks when you've already opened the door.
What it won't do
Work offline
It's a weather app. Fresh conditions need a connection. Installed to your home screen it will open offline and show you the last forecast it saw, clearly labeled with when that was.
Show radar absolutely everywhere
Radar is a global composite now, drawn from over a thousand national radar networks, so most populated places are covered. But radar is ground-based: large parts of the oceans, the high Arctic, and stretches of central Asia and Africa have no station within range. Where there's nothing to show, the radar simply doesn't appear.
Interrupt you
With no server and no way to run in the background, Ovrvue physically cannot notify you out of the blue. Event Watch notes are written while you have the app open and then wait quietly in the shade — never a sound, never a banner over what you're doing, and never more than two per weather event. They stay off until you switch them on, and they need a saved home location, because a warning about Thursday is only useful somewhere you'll still be on Thursday. On iPhone they work only in the installed version.
Ask you for an account
There isn't one. No sign-up, no email, no password, no ads. Your saved location, your settings and your API key live on your device and go nowhere else.
Track you
There is one counter: an anonymous tally of page visits, so I can tell whether anyone besides me is using this. No cookies, no account, no advertising networks, nothing that follows you to another site, and nothing that could point back at you specifically. I can see that Ovrvue was opened — not who opened it.
Hide where the data comes from
You bring your own free forecast key, so you can see exactly what you're using and nobody is reselling your requests.
Getting started
Ovrvue needs a free Pirate Weather API key to fetch forecasts. It takes about a minute, once.
On iPhone or iPad, install first. Safari and the home-screen version keep separate storage, so a key you type into Safari won't be there after you add Ovrvue to your Home Screen. Tap Share, then Add to Home Screen, and do the steps below inside the installed app.
- Go to Pirate Weather plans and subscribe to the Free tier — 10,000 requests a month, which is far more than one person uses.
- Copy your key from My Subscriptions.
- Open Ovrvue, tap the ☰ menu, choose API Key & Usage, and paste it in.
To put Ovrvue on your phone's home screen, open your browser's menu and look for Install — the exact wording differs by browser, and on iPhone it's Add to Home Screen, which only Safari offers. Once installed it opens without a browser bar, which gives you back the space at the top of the screen. Ovrvue will also offer this from its own ☰ menu on browsers that allow it.
Support Ovrvue
Ovrvue is free, has no ads, and will stay that way. It does cost a domain and a bit of hosting, and the time to keep improving it. If you're getting real use out of it and want to chip in, there's a tip jar — entirely optional, and nothing in the app is gated behind it.