In Short: An app called ‘Weather Timeline’ has been unpublished from the Play Store, the company has reported. Weather Timeline has been one of the most popular weather applications in recent years, and the company has announced that the app has not been abandoned, and that it is still available for existing users, they can download it via the My Apps section in the Google Play Store. The developer says that it had to do this, otherwise he’d be forced to introduce an in-app subscription model, and Weather Timeline is already a paid app, so that wouldn’t exactly be the best move.
Background: Weather Timeline has been available via the Google Play Store for years now, since Android 4.4 KitKat, and the developer says that it has been cloned several times, and that he almost ended up being sued in the process. He says that most users have been using this app since 2014/2015, and considering it was a one-time purchase (of which Google takes 30-percent), and it hasn’t been downloaded all that much in recent years, it got to a point that the developer was not able to sustain it any longer it seems, at least not in full capacity. Weather Timeline brought a rather appealing design to the table when it arrived, with a slew of interesting features. Over time, the design of the app changed a bit, as did its functionality, but that only added to the experience.
Impact: Weather Timeline was quite a popular app, and a number of users actually used it on a daily basis, so this decision certainly will not go down well with them, even though most of them will probably understand this decision. The developer had to do something similar with a third-party Twitter app, Flamingo, many months ago. There are still many great weather apps available in the Play Store, even though Weather Timeline was a rather unique offering, mainly due to its design, and we’ve even included it in our top 10 weather apps list earlier this year.