After being released nearly five years ago during the Windows Phone 7 era, AU Weather Pro was delisted from the Windows Store earlier this month by Mobilewares.net developer and Microsoft MVP Niall Ginsbourg. This action was a direct result of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology terminating its public forecast data feed which had served as the data source for the weather app.
Ginsbourg noted the following in his post on Whirlpool:
Whilst an alternative public data feed is available, the copyright terms for it have been marked as ‘strictly for personal use’ – which in essence means I’m not allowed to utilize those within AU Weather Pro at all. The only other option involves paying for the commercial feeds, and is unfortunately not a viable option as it’s priced specifically towards large companies and major media organizations (amounts that significantly outweigh any past/future revenue from sales of this App given the incredibly small Windows Phone market in Australia).
Ginsbourg went on to speculate that the termination of the public data feed was possibly linked to severe budget cuts to the CSIRO and BOM of which the former expected to lose funding of up to AU$150 million a year.
However, an unnamed AU Weather Pro user complained to the BOM about the deactivation of the public feed and later forwarded the response to Ginsbourg. The response stated that, "The Bureau of Meteorology intends to release an app for Windows in 2016." At this stage, the specific scope and architecture of the Windows app remains unknown. As such, the official BOM weather app could be nothing more than a wrapper for its mobile site which would be disappointing given the availability of other native weather apps for Windows.
In the meantime, Windows Phone and Windows 10 Mobile users down under can purchase the Weather and Surf Australia app which sources BOM data for weather forecasts.
Source: Whirlpool | Australian flag image via Shutterstock