Rain Start is the biggest release since launch. The countdown you already know is still the first thing you see — everything else has been rebuilt around it.

A COMPLETE PICTURE ON ONE SCREEN

The home screen no longer sends you hunting through tabs. Active weather alerts for your area now appear directly above the countdown, so a severe warning reaches you the moment you open the app. Below the ring you'll find humidity paired with the current dew point, a live wind card showing speed, gusts and direction on a compass rose, and visibility alongside cloud cover. The next-hour precipitation chart — minute-level intensity for the sixty minutes ahead — now sits on the same screen instead of behind a separate view. One pull to refresh updates all of it at once.

WIDGETS, REDESIGNED FROM SCRATCH

Every widget has been redrawn. A new colour system shifts with the sky and the intensity of the rain, so a glance tells you the situation before you read a single number. Weather glyphs were redrawn for small sizes, and the layouts rebuilt to stay legible in tinted and accented Home Screen modes. Home Screen, Lock Screen circular, rectangular and inline widgets all share the new design, and the refresh schedule keeps them current without eating your battery.

LIGHT, DARK, OR AUTOMATIC

A new Appearance setting lets you pin the app to Light or Dark, or leave it on Automatic to follow your device. Your choice carries across to the widgets, so your Home Screen and the app finally agree with each other. The countdown, the Live Activity and the launch screen keep their night sky in both appearances.

INTRODUCING PREMIUM

Rain Start Premium unlocks the features built for people who plan around the weather:

- The Live Activity countdown on your Lock Screen and in the Dynamic Island
- Unlimited saved locations, so home, work and wherever you're headed are a tap away
- Every alert lead time at once — one hour, thirty, fifteen and five minutes before the first drop
- The full ten-day outlook
- Every widget size, plus Light and Dark theming

The minute-by-minute countdown for your current location, the next-hour intensity chart and current conditions stay free. That is the heart of the app and it is not going behind a paywall.

Subscriptions are handled by your Apple Account and can be cancelled at any time. Restore Purchases sits at the top of Settings if you're returning or setting up a new device.

FASTER, STEADIER, SAFER

Most of this release you won't see, and that's the point.

The launch sequence has been rewritten so the forecast fetch runs alongside the opening animation — the app is ready by the time the splash clears. We fixed a crash that could occur on first launch, and a deadlock that could leave a refresh spinning forever. Permission prompts now wait their turn instead of appearing over the walkthrough.

Networking has been hardened with proper timeouts and retry handling, and forecast data is validated before it reaches the screen, so a malformed response can't produce a nonsense countdown. Background refresh now respects the system's energy budget. The local database has been versioned, so future updates migrate your settings and saved locations cleanly. Under the hood the app moved to Swift 6 concurrency, eliminating an entire class of threading bugs.

ALSO IN THIS RELEASE

- The 10-day forecast opens faster, with a redesigned high/low range bar
- Wind, visibility and precipitation respect your unit preference everywhere, widgets included
- More accurate start and stop times when a shower straddles the top of the hour
- Reduce Motion is honoured across every animated surface
- Improved VoiceOver labels throughout the home screen and Settings

Thank you for using Rain Start. Every bug report and feature request in this release came from someone who wrote in — you'll find Report a Bug and Request a Feature in Settings, and we read all of it.