For Australians talking about the weather can be a fairly extreme time, it was -6° here in Canberra earlier this week, while up in Darwin they’re looking at 30°. The team at Shifty Jelly have made one of our favourite weather apps – Pocket Weather AU for some time now, but it’s time to call it quits with the Shifty Jelly team announcing the app is being removed from Google Play (and the iOS app store).
The decision to end Pocket Weather AU comes in the wake of the recent acquisition of Shifty Jelly by a public radio consortium to further their work on the award winning Pocket Casts podcast player.
Chief Product Officer at Pocket Casts, Russell Ivanovic announced the end in a melancholy post on the Shifty Jelly blog today, announcing that they ‘are removing the iOS and Android versions from the store today, so they will no longer be for sale’.
The back end supporting the beautiful and brilliantly functional Pocket Weather AU app won’t go away immediately, with Russell advising that the servers will remain on ‘for at least the next 12 months and probably longer’. Once they go though, that’s it.
They did attempt to shop around the app and the related back end infrastructure to other developers out there, but it’s a big ask for an app that’s so specifically Australian focused and the back-end server costs can’t be insignificant.
As a measure of good faith – and evidence that they’re just good blokes – they’ve generously offered a refund of the app to anyone who recently purchased Pocket Weather AU from either Google Play or the iOS app store. If you’re that way inclined, you can reach out to them on their Twitter account: @pocketweatherau.
The Ausdroid team are of course a little devastated by the news, we love Pocket Weather AU and we’re sad to see them go. A big thanks to Russell, Phil, Chris and the rest of the Pocket Weather team for the years we got out of Pocket Weather, we really loved it.
