Weather Underground API is a great weather provider that offers lots of API endpoints to get detailed information. The Weather Underground API provides current weather and forecast. Simple and fast and free weather API from OpenWeatherMap you have access to current weather data, 5- and 16-day forecasts, UV Index, air pollution and historical data.

Thinking of building an app that displays weather information? Here are some APIs that can help you.

Join the DZone community and get the full member experience.

Join For Free

Android apps that give weather information are common in the Play store. Moreover, weather apps and widgets are amongst the most downloaded apps.

When it is time to develop a weather app, it is necessary to use a weather provider as the source of weather information. These weather providers expose a set of services or, in other words, an API, that supports RESTful web services.

Most of these services accept XML or JSON data. It is important to know the service features before selecting the right provider for our needs.

Generally speaking, the first point to consider is if the Android app will be free or not. Based on this, it is possible to select the right weather provider because some features may be not free. Moreover, there are weather providers that limit the number of calls to their services if you select a free plan. So consider the weather provider carefully as usually it is not so easy to change the client code once you have developed the app. The client will be tightly dependent on the weather API, so if you change the API you have to re-implement your client.

To make the process of selecting the right weather provider a little easier, I compiled a list of weather providers that I have used and tested.

Openweathermap

This is the first provider I ever used and this is my preferred one. Openweathermap gives current weather information and forecasts. It is very simple to use. The Openweathermap weather API uses JSON to exchange data.

The weather API returns current weather, forecast, historical weather information and weather station data. Moreover, it also has UV index data.

How can we get weather information for a selected location? Openweathermap provides different two modes to look for a city. One uses name pattern and another using geo-coordinates.