Best weather apps of 2020

Weather apps provide one of the most basic but important tasks, giving you a forecast to plan your day and week. Depending on which one you choose to download, you may also get added information like monthly forecasts, precipitation totals and humidity levels. 

However, any third-party weather app -- as in, those that don't come built-in to your phone -- poses a risk, since they operate using location data, and sometimes ask for permissions they don't actually need. A number of weather apps, including those from AccuWeather, The Weather Channel and WeatherBug, have come under fire or faced lawsuits for selling location data to advertisers. 

The built-in Weather app on your iPhone (which uses data from The Weather Channel) or Google Weather app on your Android may not be perfect, but if you're already in those device ecosystems, they have your location information otherwise. If you want to be even safer, check the weather manually in your internet browser or another device. 

There are hundreds of weather apps in the App Store and Play Store, so we haven't tried them all. But these are the ones we liked best, along with their privacy policy information. All are available on iOS and Android.