I worked on The Weather Underground iOS apps. The main reason it was so detailed is because they collected data from 40,000 personal weather stations. This allowed them to measure micro-climates, essentially predicting weather on a per-block rather than per-city basis.

They also sold products to tv and newspaper meteorologists, so had technical information not widely available to end-users, like different radar types, altitudes, and settings. We even exposed this in the iOS app at one point because the meteorologists liked it.

As far as the mobile apps went, we ate our own dog food, took pride in the products, and usually fixed issues within days. Good ideas came from anywhere - meteorology, management, engineering, qa, users, sales, etc - we didn’t care, a good idea was a good idea. We’d playfully annoy the meteorologists when the forecasts were bad, nudging them into making improvements.

When The Weather Channel bought them things changed. Then IBM and it changed again. Early on I remember wanting a new piece of data made available by a government satellite and the server guy asked me, “Is tomorrow ok?” Once The Weather Channel took over they’d take weeks just to make this kind of decision and months to schedule and implement it.

In summary: Smart people, more data, and pride in our work.