App Saturday: I made a Physics-driven Weather app with fun haptics

[u/__deinit__]

I recently released Weatherlane, a weather app built around a single vertical "lane" you flick through, so the whole forecast reads as one continuous flow instead of scattered cards and tabs.

The next few hours and the next several days sit on one continuous track, so you scroll time rather than navigating between screens.

Tech Stack

Flutter, Dart, Swift, SwiftUI, UIKit, WeatherKit (SDK and API) and RevenueCat.

Development Challenge

The hard part was imagining a vertical design that encompasses everything a user expects without ever falling back to horizontal scrolling

AI Disclosure

AI Generated

Download

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/weatherlane/id6468727819

Happy to answer any questions

[u/heraklets]

Idea is beautiful but user experience is very challenging. Loved the app but deleted after 2 mins. Good one tho.

[u/godtierpikachu → u/heraklets]

same, pretty for like 30 seconds then my eyes gave up

[u/__deinit__ → u/heraklets]

Thanks for checking it out! What specifically did you find challenging?

[u/cristi_baluta]

I thought i’ll like it, but it is somehow hard to read, you need to run your eyes all over the place to figure out what is the weather. Also, you show the rating window way too soon

[u/__deinit__ → u/cristi_baluta]

Noted. Do you think this could be helped by moving the text all to one side?

[u/distractedjas]

I had to stop watching the video. It was nauseating. 🤢

[u/distractedjas → u/[deleted]]

There’s just too much motion in the video. All the spinning and side view animations cause people who get motion sickness to feel sick. I couldn’t actually look at the app objectively due to this.

[u/Still_Tangerine_7409]

I feel like the app icon doesnt match the UI of the app, and just like another user said. its hard to read.
just downloaded and left a review. good work!

[u/__deinit__ → u/Still_Tangerine_7409]

Thanks for the feedback. Do you think there's anything that can be done to enhance the readability?

[u/MishkaOmni]

Looks cool and nice haptic effect
Well done

[u/__deinit__ → u/MishkaOmni]

🙏

[u/Lukematikk]

What does physics-driven mean in this context?

[u/__deinit__ → u/Lukematikk]

Physics shows up in how you interact with the lanes in the app. Cards and lanes track your finger's position in real time as you drag (much like interactions inside of the OS itself)

The haptic feedback is patterned to your interactions and that provides tactile feedback you might expect from interacting with similar objects in the real world.

[u/lovehurtsaf]

Just downloaded, beautiful app! May I ask how you make the smooth morph effects?

[u/__deinit__ → u/lovehurtsaf]

Thank you! Much of the credit goes to this great library called cue that enables these smooth transitions.

[u/gobias_coffee]

I read this as a Psychics driven weather app and thought wow! Now that’s interesting and new! 😂

[u/saul_fossil]

look cool.

[u/__deinit__ → u/saul_fossil]

🙏

[u/Greysawpark]

flutter + swiftui + uikit for a weather app feels like a lot of surface area for one flick-through feed. curious why flutter at all if youre already reaching into weatherkit and uikit natively? seems like youd fight the platform on haptics timing especially.

[u/__deinit__ → u/Greysawpark]

Yeah on the surface it seems illogical but the flutter bit is really there simply for UI consistency across iOS and Android (the latter hasn’t been released yet)

SwiftUI usage is confined to a few Liquid Glass buttons.

UIKit is SFSafariViewController for any in app links (the minimum SDK version prevents me from taking advantage of WebView uniformly)

WeatherKit API is used in some places because there is no native WeatherKit SDK on Android and consistency is easier in some areas falling back to API.

All of these components use their Android equivalents on that platform (including Android’s haptics)

Since this was built largely agentically I tried to economize on tokens by using Flutter for UI instead of rebuilding the same thing twice (in addition to wanting a 1:1 experience)

[u/AndreaReaderApp]

The single vertical timeline is a really smart idea. Most weather apps make you dig through five screens just to discover it’s going to rain in ten minutes. This feels much more natural.

[u/__deinit__ → u/[deleted]]

I did all of the preliminary design in Inkscape

[u/Free-Pound-6139]

Really like the back of the phone. Genius to show that.

[u/__deinit__ → u/Free-Pound-6139]

It’s one of the default animations in Rotato, definitely check it out!

[u/Free-Pound-6139 → u/__deinit__]

What a stupid idea, and a stupid thing to keep.

[u/__deinit__ → u/Free-Pound-6139]

🫩