“The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.” — Mark Twain

While Mark Twain did not actually say that, I do share the sentiment - I commute into the city (from Cupertino) 3 days a week, and every summer there are days when I realize I am underdressed for the temperatures that await me. I have long wanted to add a “work location” mode to Weather Text, my bespoke weather app. The tedium of coding the configuration UI had always put me off the idea, but it’s now mid-2026, which is a different development era than mid-2024, when the app originated¹. Prompted by a recent heat wave, I had a conversation with Codex and ended up with pretty much what I always wanted:

It turned out Codex missed some edge cases and a bit of visual polish, but the feature has been working for me pretty much as intended.

With the app getting this bit of polish, I figured I should capitalize on my momentum and actually publish it to the App Store. Doing a TestFlight build every 90 days got old after the first few times. Worse, I’d occasionally forget, and it would take me a while to notice (the failure mode is a stale complication on the watch face, and the weather around here does not change often).

My rationale for having it be TestFlight-only was that I didn’t want to accidentally end up over the free WeatherKit quota. But the other thing that’s different in 2026 is that the flood of AI-generated apps means that the average app is even less likely to be installed². With the weather app segment being especially crowded³ I figured the odds of getting unexpected installs were near zero.

I was prepared for some runaround with the App Store review process, since it uses Apple weather data (which has attribution and display requirements) and needs location access. It’s also a watch-only app, which is a more obscure category (and presumably has fewer reviewers assigned). But so far it’s sailed through both submissions I’ve made.

The upshot is that you can now install Weather Text more directly, but please don’t tell your friends.