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The iPad is wonderfultastic, but it is missing a good weather application. I found The Weather Channel Max for iPad application right away, and it was also free (not as in GNU, yes I know the difference). I gave it a try. I really liked it. The radar was one of the most important features to me, but it was a little buggy at first. They resolved that pretty quickly. I loved this weather application. I deleted it Tuesday.

Why? Great question that I can’t help but answer. First of all, the application is free. I expected there to be some advertising, especially since it was clear that it was “brought to me by Toyota” right from the start. Oh, they don’t let you forget it either. Toyota. Toyota. Toyota! I’ve used free software before that was supported through reasonable advertising and I survived. They key word here is “reasonable”. The Weather Channel Max for iPad application is light years beyond reasonable.

It started right away when I switched to the local forecast view from the radar. Occasionally I would get a full screen ad. The screen would fade to black and a video ad would play. Luckily it was only slightly painful to cancel the video. First of all, that’s not reasonable advertising. It’s completely intrusive to the overall experience, but it only happened about every second time I switched. There’s also an ad that plays in the local forecast view anyway, sans sound. Is that not enough? That’s what I would expect in this case. They aren’t having it though. They’ve got to go the extra 10 miles. Since I loved the radar the most, it didn’t affect me much. However, after some updates it started happening every single time I switched away from the radar. At first I thought the application was broken and I closed it even though I had experienced this ridiculous advertising method before. I’ve been a systems administrator and software developer for over a decade, and I’ve used some incredibly terrible UIs before. I am not a computing novice by any stretch of the imagination, so when this is confusing to me, it might be a general problem. Just saying…

I would like to know who thought that advertising this intrusive was a good idea? It’s totally insane. It ruins the application. I really want to know if it was The Weather Channel or Toyota. I want to know who to dislike more. Their advertising experiment has totally backfired on me. Now it seems that I don’t care for either one when once I did. I deleted this application and actually paid for one that’s not as good. That fact alone is why this application is a total failure. Total. Epic. Advertising. Fail. Period. Let’s not even consider what it takes to make someone actually write about the fact.

Let’s take a look at the application ratings at the time I left my review after deleting it:

*****		544
 ****		367
  ***		738
   **		1157
    *		3375

Let’s break that down:

• Good or Great Count: 911
• Indifferent Count: 738
• Hate it or Don’t Like it Count: 4532

Interesting, but I’ll break it down to percentages too:

• 14.7% of users have a favorable opinion.
• 12.0% of users don’t seem to care.
• 73.3% of users hate the application.

Even by any stretch of the imagination, those ratings suck. That’s just for the current version. I can only see the average for all versions, but it’s still shown as two stars. A number of people complained about the advertising. A lot of people seem to have stability problems, but I never did. Apparently there are a lot of reasons to dislike this application. Dislike is the kind version of me saying “hate this application”. Honestly, some of the positive reviews sound fake to me as well, but that might just be due to my view of the application. I don’t understand how anyone can like it.

This application deserves five stars as an example of how not to incorporate advertising into your free application. Especially when it actually drives people away and some of them actually buy a lesser quality paid application to escape the hell of your application’s UI advertising “feature”. I’d probably buy an ad free version of this application, but it was so annoying that I don’t know if I would really go that far. Did I mention how this was an epic fail?

It’s so annoying that it’s funny. I can’t believe someone thought this was a good idea. I would like to meet that person just to know how this view is even possible.