StationCast 11.0

What's new since 10.23

The headline for 11.0 is a new platform: StationCast now runs on Apple Watch. The watch app gives you a quick-glance hero screen for your primary station — current temperature, high/low, conditions, and sunrise or sunset timing — right on your wrist. Alongside the watch, Android gains feature parity with maps, charts, and sharing, Alexa learns a detailed weather report mode, and Dynamic Type support is tightened up on iPhone and iPad.

Apple Watch

StationCast now has a standalone watchOS app. It syncs your primary station from iPhone via WatchConnectivity and fetches live observations directly from the backend, so it works even when your phone is out of Bluetooth range.

• Hero screen. A single glanceable view showing the current temperature (large, center), daily high and low, weather condition with icon, station name, and sunrise or sunset context — all on a weather-condition-driven gradient background.
• Live freshness. A label at the top shows how recently the observation was recorded (“3 min ago”), updating every minute. The label shifts from neutral to orange to red as the data ages.
• Refresh button. A small circular button in the bottom-right corner triggers a manual refresh from the backend.
• Automatic sync. When you add, remove, or rename stations on iPhone, or change unit preferences, the watch picks up the changes automatically.
• Works independently. The watch fetches observations from the StationCast backend over Wi-Fi or cellular, so it doesn’t need the iPhone nearby after the initial station sync.

Android catches up

The Android app received a significant round of feature parity work, bringing it much closer to the iPhone experience.

• Saved-station map. A new map screen shows your saved stations as temperature-tinted pins, with tap-to-detail and camera framing matching the iOS map. Location permissions now support precise location for better pin context.
• Foreground refresh. Returning to the Android app now triggers a stale-aware observation refresh, so you always see current data.
• Temperature chart with overlays. The 24-hour temperature chart now supports dew point overlay, freezing line, and sunlight hour shading — all preference-gated, matching the iOS chart.
• Per-metric sparklines. Daily sparklines on metric cards, gated by the same setting as iOS.
• Share card. A share button renders a weather PNG through the system share sheet, matching the iOS share image (minus the QR code for now).
• Settings parity. Distance units, duration format, freezing line, dew point overlay, sunlight hours, and daily sparkline preferences are all now available on Android.
• Release signing. Android builds are now signed for distribution with R8 minification enabled.

Alexa gets a detailed weather mode

The Alexa skill now supports two report styles. The default brief report is unchanged — current conditions in a sentence or two. A new detailed mode gives a fuller picture:

• “Alexa, ask Station Cast for a detailed weather report.”
• The detailed response includes temperature, feels-like, humidity, wind speed and direction, pressure with trend, and precipitation — essentially the same data you’d see on the station detail screen, spoken aloud.

The skill also received deployment fixes for cross-signed certificate validation, invocation name normalization, and station ID handling.

Dynamic Type done right

At larger system text sizes, some station detail layouts used to break — metric card headers truncated, the solar card header overlapped, and positioned elements overflowed their slots. That’s fixed:

• Dynamic Type is now capped at xxxLarge, so accessibility sizes render consistently instead of falling off a layout cliff.
• Metric card headers and values scale gracefully with minimum scale factors.
• The solar card switches to a stacked layout at larger sizes.
• Card padding scales proportionally with text size.

Reliability and backend

The backend received continued observability work: calendar-aligned weather-provider call counters for tighter quota tracking, refreshed Grafana dashboards, and metric/log hygiene improvements. These don’t change what you see in the app, but they keep the service healthy under the hood.

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