BetterWeather Privacy Policy
Last updated: 2026-11-06
This page says what BetterWeather sends, who receives it, what is kept and for how long. It is meant to be read in full in a few minutes, and there is no separate legal version that says something different.
This policy lives at https://betterweather.cc/privacy. It is also available in French at https://betterweather.cc/fr/confidentialite.
The short version
- BetterWeather uses your location only to show the weather where you are.
- The app rounds your location on your device to 3 decimal places (about 110 m) before sending it.
- It sends it only to BetterWeather's own service at api.betterweather.cc, hosted on Cloudflare. The service rounds it again when it arrives and asks the weather providers on your behalf.
- Your location is sent separately from the web address of each request, so the records Cloudflare keeps about web requests never contain it.
- There are no accounts, no analytics, no advertising and no tracking of any kind.
- Your saved places and settings stay on your device.
- If you subscribe, Apple takes the payment and BetterWeather never sees your card, your name or your Apple ID. The service keeps a small record of the subscription itself (see "If you subscribe"), with no name, no account and no place.
- While the app is still being tested, the service keeps short-lived request logs (see "Before public release").
When the app reads your location
The app asks for permission to use your location only while you are using it. It never asks for permission to use it in the background.
It reads your location when you open the app or come back to it, and when you ask it to refresh. While the app stays open, it refreshes the weather from time to time, reusing that same location. It never reads your location in the background, does not follow your movements and does not keep a history of where you have been.
You can also search for a city instead of sharing your location.
What the app sends to BetterWeather's service
- Your rounded location (3 decimal places), to get the weather, the alerts and the next-hour rain for that place, and to find the name of the place.
- When you search for a city: the text you typed and, if you allow location, your rounded location as a hint so nearby places come first.
- If you subscribe: the signed proof of purchase that Apple provides, once, to confirm the subscription, and then a short token with each request (see "If you subscribe").
The app sends your location and the text you typed separately from the web address of the request. The web address only says which kind of answer is wanted.
We do not collect your name, email address, phone number, contacts, photos or any other personal information. There is no account to create and nothing to sign in with.
If you subscribe
The payment is between you and Apple. BetterWeather never sees your card details, your name, your email address or your Apple ID, and it creates no account for you.
To confirm that a subscription is real and still running, the app gives the service the signed proof of purchase that Apple provides, and the service checks Apple's signature. The service then keeps a small record of the subscription itself:
- Apple's transaction number for the subscription, which identifies the purchase and not you;
- which plan it is;
- its state (running, in a payment grace period, ended or refunded);
- whether it is a free trial;
- whether it renews;
- the dates it runs to.
The record holds no location, no name, no email address and no account. Apple also tells the service when a subscription renews, ends or is refunded, and the service updates the record. It deletes the record 90 days after the subscription ends or is refunded.
In return, the service gives the app a short token. The token is a random code that stands for no name and no place, and it stops working after a few days (the app renews it quietly while you use it). The app keeps it in your device's keychain and sends it in a request header, never in the web address, to BetterWeather's service and to no one else.
To keep the service from being overloaded, it counts the requests made with each token, the confirmations made for each purchase and the requests made with each private pass, for at most a minute each. These counts are held by Cloudflare's rate-limit service. A count belongs to the token's random code, to a short fingerprint of the transaction number, or to the name of a pass (a private pass is a token of the same kind that BetterWeather's own computers use, named after the computer, not after a person). A count holds a number and nothing about a place.
Your IP address
Like every service on the internet, BetterWeather's service receives your device's IP address with each request. Cloudflare, which hosts the service, uses it to deliver the request and to protect the service from abuse, under its own terms:
- When Cloudflare's protection blocks or challenges a request (for example when too many requests come from one address), it keeps a record of that request's web address with your IP address for about a month.
- Its traffic records keep the IP address with the part of the service that was asked for, also for about a month.
Neither record ever contains your location or the city you searched for, because the app does not put them in the web address. BetterWeather's own service never uses an IP address to work out where you are, and once the app is publicly released it stores none (until then, see "Before public release" below).
To stop one address from flooding the purchase check, the service counts the purchase confirmations it receives per address for one minute. It does this in the memory of the machine answering, using a short one-way fingerprint of the address, and never writes the address anywhere.
Who else receives a location
BetterWeather's service asks the weather providers directly, server to server. Your IP address is never passed on to them, and none of these requests contains anything that identifies you.
| Who | What it receives | Why | Where |
|---|---|---|---|
| MET Norway (api.met.no) | the rounded location | weather forecast | worldwide |
| BetterWeather's own server (on BetterWeather's own hardware, reached through Cloudflare) | the rounded location and, for US radar, a few points along the storm's path from it | forecasts from the weather models listed under "Data sources", the UV index, and US radar for next-hour rain | worldwide; US radar in the United States, including Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico and Guam, and in the places around them: Canada south of about 55 degrees north, plus northern British Columbia (around Dease Lake and Atlin), Yukon and the western Northwest Territories; most of Mexico; Bermuda, the Caribbean, Central America and the northern coast of South America; the eastern tip of Russia's Chukotka; and the Northern Mariana Islands and the Micronesian islands of Ulithi and Fais |
| US National Weather Service (api.weather.gov) | the rounded location | observations, forecast and alerts | United States |
| US Environmental Protection Agency (data.epa.gov) | a city and state name | UV index | United States |
| NOAA Aviation Weather Center (aviationweather.gov) | the code of a nearby airport weather station | observations | worldwide |
| Environment and Climate Change Canada (dd.weather.gc.ca) | the code of a nearby forecast site | observations and forecast | Canada |
| Environment and Climate Change Canada (api.weather.gc.ca, geo.weather.gc.ca) | a small area around the rounded location | weather alerts, and radar for next-hour rain | Canada, and radar across North America |
| Météo-France (public-api.meteofrance.fr) | the code of a nearby weather station | observations | France |
| AEMET (opendata.aemet.es) | the code of a nearby weather station | observations | Spain |
| Amazon Web Services | only large regions hundreds of kilometres wide, never your location | preparing radar for a whole region | regions with radar |
| Cloudflare | every request, as the host of the service (see "Your IP address") | running and protecting the service | worldwide |
Only the providers that cover your area are asked. BetterWeather's own server keeps no log of the locations it is asked about, whether the request is for forecasts or for US radar.
NOAA, whose national radar files BetterWeather's own server reads, receives nothing about you: the server downloads those files on a timer, whoever is asking.
The name of your place is looked up by BetterWeather's service itself, from the same rounded location, in its own copy of the GeoNames place list. City search works the same way. Neither goes to an outside service.
We do not sell, rent or share your location with advertisers, data brokers or anyone else.
What the service keeps, and for how long
To answer quickly and to keep working when a provider is down, the service keeps some answers for a short time. None of what it writes down contains your IP address; the one thing it counts per address is in the last row. Apart from the subscription record and the short counts in the last two rows, which hold no place at all, none of it identifies you, and none of it is more precise than an area about 1 km across.
| What | How precise | How long |
|---|---|---|
| Answers from the weather providers | an area about 1 km across (the providers' copy of the exact location is removed first) | up to 24 hours |
| The weather answer sent to the app | an area about 1 km across | 5 minutes |
| Alerts answers | an area about 1 km across | 30 seconds |
| How many times the weather was worked out for an area in the last 10 seconds, to protect the weather providers from bursts of requests (kept by Cloudflare's rate-limit service) | an area about 1 km across | 10 seconds |
| Radar readings for next-hour rain | one square of the radar map, about 1 km north to south and 1 to 2 km east to west | 6 minutes |
| Whether radar covers the place | an area about 1 km across | 5 minutes |
| Recent temperature, for the next-hour rain or snow | an area about 1 km across | at most 60 minutes |
| Whether radar recently showed rain there | an area about 1 km across | at most 60 minutes |
| What the next-hour rain card last said about the area, so the hourly forecast can agree with it | an area about 1 km across | 6 minutes |
| Which broad regions are asking for radar | a region hundreds of kilometres wide | at most 35 minutes after the last request |
| The subscription record described under "If you subscribe": Apple's transaction number, the plan, its state, whether it is a free trial, whether it renews and its dates | no place at all; the transaction number identifies the purchase, not you | until 90 days after the subscription ends or is refunded |
| How many requests one token, one purchase or one private pass has made, to protect the service from abuse (kept by Cloudflare's rate-limit service) | no place at all; counted by a random code, a short fingerprint of the transaction number, or a pass name | at most 60 seconds |
| How many purchase confirmations one address has made, to stop one address from flooding the purchase check (kept in the memory of the machine answering, never written anywhere) | no place at all; counted by a short one-way fingerprint of the address, never the address itself | at most 60 seconds |
An answer kept for an area, or a radar reading kept for a square of the radar map, is also given to anyone else who asks about the same area or square during that time.
Once the app is publicly released, the service's own logs never contain a location, a search, a token or an IP address.
Before public release
Note dated 2026-11-01, updated 2026-11-06. BetterWeather is still being tested. Until its public release, the service's request logs are kept for up to 7 days, so that problems can be found and fixed. For each request, they may contain the rounded location, the text of a city search, the token described under "If you subscribe", the IP address, and the approximate place Cloudflare works out from that IP address (such as a city and a postal code). This ends at public release: those logs are switched off then, and this note is removed.
What stays on your device
- Saved places and settings (units, theme and so on) are stored on your device.
- Recent forecasts are stored in a database on your device, so the app opens quickly and keeps working when a source is briefly unavailable.
- The name of the last place found for your location is kept with the area about 1 km across it was found for, so the app can show it straight away even without a connection. Only the most recent one is kept, replaced by each new name, never a list.
- Your token and the date it ends, if you subscribe, are kept in your device's keychain. The app sends the token to BetterWeather's service as described under "If you subscribe", and to no one else. If your device keeps it after the app is deleted, it stops working within days.
Apart from that token, none of this is uploaded anywhere. Uninstalling the app removes it.
No accounts, no analytics, no advertising, no tracking
BetterWeather has no accounts, no sign-in, no analytics, no crash reporter that sends personal data, no advertising and no tracking library of any kind. Every request the app makes goes to BetterWeather's service at api.betterweather.cc, except the purchase itself, which happens between your device and the App Store as in any app. BetterWeather has no access to your Apple account.
The Linux desktop version also checks GitHub's public list of releases for a newer version; that request carries no location and nothing about you.
Children
BetterWeather is a weather app for everyone. It does not knowingly collect personal information from children, and it works the same way for every user whatever their age.
Data sources and licences
The app's "Data sources" screen credits every source it uses, with its licence:
- MET Norway (CC BY 4.0)
- Open-Meteo (CC BY 4.0), which delivers the models of ECMWF (CC BY 4.0), Deutscher Wetterdienst (CC BY 4.0), Environment and Climate Change Canada's GEM model, Météo-France's ARPEGE model (Etalab Open Licence 2.0), and NOAA's GFS and HRRR models (public domain)
- the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service, for the worldwide UV index (Copernicus licence)
- Environment and Climate Change Canada, for observations, alerts and radar (Government of Canada End-use Licence)
- NOAA's MRMS radar mosaic, for US radar (NOAA open data; BetterWeather is not affiliated with or endorsed by NOAA)
- the US National Weather Service, the NOAA Aviation Weather Center and the US EPA (public domain)
- Météo-France (Etalab Open Licence 2.0)
- AEMET (AEMET legal notice)
- GeoNames, for place names and city search (CC BY 4.0)
- Natural Earth, for country boundaries (public domain)
- amCharts, for the clear day, partly cloudy day and night, and thunderstorm icons (CC BY 4.0)
- Tabler Icons, for the snowflake icon (MIT)
Changes to this policy
When this policy changes, the date at the top changes. A change to what is sent, who receives it or what is kept is also mentioned in the app's release notes.
Contact
Questions about this policy or about your data: privacy@betterweather.cc