This year marks the fifth anniversary of the Space City Weather app, which lets you read Eric and Matt’s blog posts, see current conditions for locations around the Houston area and get hourly and weekly forecasts. We’ve added a slew of features over the years – dark mode, a tablet layout, more cities and a way to report issues and offer feedback, among them.
For 2026, most of the updates are under the hood, but that doesn’t mean you won’t notice a big change. Thanks to developer Hussain Abbasi’s tireless efforts, the SCW app is fast. Like, crazy fast. As in, super-zippy!
Did I mention it’s fast? It really is!
We submitted it to the Apple App Store and Google Play store on Tuesday and it has been approved in both stores. We are rolling it out over the next week or so, so if you have app updates set automatically, it should eventually appear. If you manually update, you can start checking for it starting … now.
As always, the Apple version works on iPhones, iPads and Macs. The Android version works on phones (including Android foldables), tablets and, if you use Microsoft’s PhoneLink feature, you can display it on a Windows PC.
Here’s what’s new:
Although our focus for 2026 was laying the groundwork for big things in the future, there are a few tweaks we’ve made that address questions and issues we frequently hear from users of the app.
- At least once a month, we hear from someone who wants us to know that we have misspelled the word “humidity” on the app as “houmidity.” As we have explained several times, this is a feature, not a bug. It’s a word Eric coined in a post back in 2023, and it describes the like-you’re-living-in-someone’s-mouth level of moisture that’s a signature of Houston summers. To make it clear this is not a typo, we’ve added a tongue-in-cheek “TM” to the Houmidity label on the app’s home page. If you don’t understand that it’s not an error after this, well, I’m not sure we can help you.
- We also get occasional requests to add Bush Intercontinental Airport to the list of cities. The Houston item in the city picker drawer is actually that airport, because it’s the official weather station for the city. To make that clear, we’ve added a parenthetical (IAH) to the Houston listing.
- We also get lots of requests to add various cities that aren’t currently in our city picker drawer, and this year we have added two: The Woodlands and Bay City (which in case you didn’t know, is not actually on a bay; it’s landlocked!). There are now 14 cities in the picker, and if you don’t see them all on a smaller screen, just scroll up. Yes, we know those may not be YOUR cities, but hold that thought…
- Good news for Android users! We’ve added the ability to zoom in on images in the SCW posts, a feature that has been missing. You may now pinch-and-zoom with impunity!
- OK, now it’s time for the cool stuff. Hussain, working closely with technical lead Lee Hutchinson, have built a new server-based foundation for the Space City Weather app. From the beginning, the app has gotten its data directly from the National Weather Service’s servers. That’s a lot of requests made to the government’s computers, and if they weren’t working properly, it could cause issues in our app. With this version, we have a back end that pulls in the NWS data once and stores it on servers we control. When you open the new version of the app, it will talk to our servers, which are more responsive than the NWS ones (no brag, just fact!). You should notice the difference immediately – the app feels much friskier! This also means we can make changes to certain parts of the app without going through the process of pushing new versions to the app stores.
What kind of changes, you may ask? - Remember the addition of the those two cities I mentioned? Our new architecture allows us to add more cities – or change the ones we have there now – on the fly, without releasing a new app version. For now we’ll stick with the 14 locations we have, but we may make changes as weather events require. For example, if we know a hurricane is taking aim at Corpus Christi, we might add that location temporarily. We will use this new capability judiciously, but stay tuned.
- This new foundation will also let us allow users to customize the app by picking and choosing from a longer list of area cities, though that will require more work next year. It may also let us add your current location as an option, but that means we’ll need to track where you are. We’ve mentioned this as a possibility before, and we emphasize that, if added, it will be opt-in. If you want to share your current location, that’s something you’ll have to turn on. It will be off by default – and at the moment, this possible feature is an aspiration, not a promise.
Also likely coming next year: A design refresh. Right now Hussain builds the app so it looks the same on both Apple and Android devices. If all goes well, we will move to designs that are native to each platform. That means those who use the app on iPhones, iPads and Macs will see it using Apple’s Liquid Glass design; Android users will see their version in Material 3. We have used the same design since the app debuted in 2021; it’s time for a glow-up!
The app continues to be free, and ad-free, thanks to our sponsor, Reliant. And as always, we don’t track you or gather data from you.
We’ve been testing the new version for a while and it seems pretty solid. But because it is a new version, and there’s been an extensive reworking of the app’s underlying systems, there may be a bug or two. If you find an issue, you can report it by going to the Settings (3-line menu next to the home screen city name, then tap the gear icon in the picker drawer) and choosing Send Feedback.
Enter as much detail as you can about the problem, and hit the Send button. This will automatically dispatch a log of what’s happening inside the app, which is very helpful for troubleshooting.
If crashes prevent you from getting to this menu option, first make sure you have the latest version of the app, then send us an email with as much info as you can, including the kind of phone and model; the version of the operating system you’re using; and a detailed description of what’s happening. (If you use the Send Feedback feature, the details about your phone and operating system are automatically included.)
We hope you like the improvements this year, and as always, we appreciate your downloading and using the app, and being a part of the SCW family!
