Early one morning, shortly after switching from the Pixel 8 to theGalaxy S24+, I opened up the Play Store and searchedGoogle Weather.I was looking for the Weather app that got its own Play Store listing and app drawer iconon Pixel phones late last year, forgetting at the time that it was a Pixel exclusive. So of course I didn’t find it, but I did stumble upon an endearingly low-quality copycat app listed under the name “Frog weather forecast.”
Frog Weather bills itself as a “Simple and funny weather forecast app,” and with its blue-and-white UI and illustrations of frogs doing cute things in various weather conditions, it’s very obviously meant to pull in users looking for Google’s weather app. With more than half a million downloads and a shockingly high average rating, it’s apparently pretty popular — but you shouldn’t download it, for a few reasons.
Is Frog Weather any good?
Well, not really
Frog Weather is high in the results when you search “Google Weather” on the Play Store from a non-Pixel Android phone. It mimics a lot of the elements of Google’s weather interface — the slightly older one, from beforeGoogle redesigned the whole thing last year. Like Google, Frog Weather has a frog mascot that lives in a mushroom hut and gets up to a lot of the same activities: riding a bike, flying a kite, stargazing, et cetera.
That’s on the nose enough, but Frog Weather goes so far as to ape most of the old Google Weather interface’s UI elements: you scroll up from a full-screen frog illustration to access an hourly forecast, details about precipitation over time, wind, air quality, and even an arc-shaped graph of the sun’s trajectory throughout the day. It’s not ambiguous: this app is designed to look like the weather tool Google built. Frog Weather feels decidedly lower budget, though, from its bug-eyed frog illustrations to its ungainly UI design featuring awkward spacing and clashing colors.
Frog Weather does have one edge over Google: live weather maps. But the maps don’t render correctly and are always noticeably pixelated, and because none of the types of maps (precipitation, temperature, cloud cover, wind, and atmospheric pressure) feature legends, there’s no way to tell what they’re showing with any specificity.
As you’d expect, there are apparently ads in Frog Weather, and there’s an optional $2/year subscription to remove them. I sayapparentlybecause I’ve been using the app for a while now and haven’t actually seen any ads, even though many user reviews specifically complain about them. It’s possible they only populate when you give Frog Weather access to your location, but there’s an explicit warning the app “may share location data with third parties” when it asks permission (I declined).
Despite a number of recent three-, two-, and one-star reviews visible on the app’s listing, its overall rating on the Play Store is an unbelievable 4.6 stars, higher than many legitimate weather apps. It’s also, surprisingly, not abandoned: the app was updated as recently as December (the changelog simply reads “New frogs; Bugfixing”). But given the crappy user experience, the ad and subscription model, and the sketchy location permission request, you may want to steer clear, especially when it’s so easy to access the real thing.
How to get Google Weather on non-Pixel phones
It’s not hard
I found this app like I imagine most people do: trying to get a shortcut to the actual Google Weather app on my phone’s home screen. On Pixel phones, it should already be in your app drawer. It takes a little legwork on other phones. There are a couple of ways to do it, but it doesn’t require downloading any new apps.
If you add the Google app’sAssistant At a Glancewidget to your home screen, tapping the weather icon will open Google’s official weather interface, complete with frogs. If you just want a home screen shortcut, search the word"weather"in theGoogle app, tap thethree dotsat the top right corner of the forecast card, then tapAdd to homescreen. This’ll give you a home screen icon that opens Google Weather.
There are plenty of good weather apps on Android, and if you prefer Google’s weather interface, it’s not hard to access, even on non-Pixel phones. So while I applaud developer giovsoft’s commitment to the bit, there’s not much reason to download Frog Weather — aside from maybe morbid curiosity, that is.
The 10 best weather apps on Android
None of them feature frogs, though
