A Croatian weather app directly from Zadar is gaining in popularity across the country and the wider region.
As Morski writes on the 5th of February, 2018, when it comes to the most accurate weather forecasts, most seafarers, fishermen and people along the coast have been using Norwegian apps and English prognostic models for the last few years, which have indeed proved to be the most accurate.
The naval boater Ivan Toman and the company “Up Studio” from the Dalmatian coastal city of Zadar have decided to opt for a change and compile weather forecasts for hundreds of locations across Croatia with the use of meteorological maps and dozens of parameters that alternate automatically every hour. Despite censorship attempts, the app is rapidly gaining in popularity among users from different platforms.
”We pay millions for meteorological services from the budget, and from what we can see from the comments on forums and on social networks, Croats generally don’t have much trust in them. The reasons are, as can be seen from the explanations, imprecision,” stated Ivan Toman from Zadar, who spoke with the Adriatic portal Morski about the app.
The decision comes after frequent and long-term inquiries from the users of the MeteoAdriatic portal about when a new mobile app will be made. Prognostic previews from the portal are somewhat unmanageable on pretty small mobile browsers. The creation of a mobile application effectively solves this problem and it was one of its basic design goals – to provide a simple overview of predictive weather data from a portal on a mobile device.
”For this I’m not entirely credible. My programming capabilities aren’t versatile enough to create the ultimate mobile app. I’m more oriented to mathematics than to programming tasks. This task was handed over to the team of young experts and entrepreneurs from Up Studio from Zadar. The team consists of Marin Babajko as the main developer of the application, and Ive Botunac and Šime Kalac from Up Studio, as well as the contribution of Daniel Lisica who made part of the graphic application solution. My job is to provide all the meteorological data that can be found in the application, meaning that dynamic part. This data is obtained using complex meteorological weather simulation software, specially adapted to our region. I have 11 years of work with such software behind me, and everything I learned during that period I embedded myself in a system that supplies the application with the necessary meteorological data.
Ivan went on to that that the application allows you to view meteorological material from the portal and this is one of its main goals, and that it should be kept in mind that this product is quite unique on the Croatian market. Every user will immediately notice that after installing the application.
The app was among the most popular in just a couple of days.
During the very first three days since the app was released on Google Play, it had been installed several thousand times. On the third day, it was already ranked fifth in popularity for meteorological applications in the region. In less than the first 24 hours, it received 180 ratings from users on Google Play and all 180 were pure fives without a quarter or lower. Of course, at this point, there are lower grades, around 4.9. Also, comments on Google Play say that it’s really a product with great potential and future.
Since developers have created the app for free, their work is paid back from the application exploitation itself. Depending on the platform, different modes are available to achieve this. Currently, the application is available for the Android operating system and can be downloaded from the Google Play store as a completely free app for the end user, but showing a very small banner ad on the bottom that doesn’t interfere with its use.
Users who do not want to see any advertisements can buy it for just over six US dollars, a one-time payment. There is a small complication here, because Google doesn’t allow the sale of mobile apps via its Play store to Croatian companies such as Up Studio, which is the result of unnecessary bureaucratic obstacles that Croatia imposes. The only way to sell apps to companies from Croatia is through the Amazon AppStore, which is almost identical to Google Play. Through this system, it’s possible to buy the Meteo Adriatic application and use it without advertisements popping up, thus supporting the developers who develop it and will continue to upgrade it from version to version.
As for IOS, and it will also be available on the Apple Store as a free version with ads, but the possibility of purchasing the premium version will be able to be done directly from the Apple Store as opposed to the Android version.
