WidgetAICustom weather widget for iPhone: hourly, sunrise, rain
Apple's Weather widget is good. It's free, it's accurate, and for a lot of people it's the right answer. The trouble starts when you want something slightly different from what it offers: the hourly forecast without the rest, sunrise and sunset in big type, the chance of rain for your commute, or the weather sitting next to your next meeting on one tile. None of that is a setting. This post is about building a weather widget that shows exactly the fields you care about, by describing it.
What the stock widget gives you, and what it doesn't
The built-in widget comes in a few fixed layouts: current conditions with a high and low, a small hourly strip, a daily strip. The layouts are fixed, and the content is too. You can't drop the daily forecast to make room for a bigger temperature, you can't add air quality to the small size, and you certainly can't put anything non-weather on the same tile.
Most third-party weather apps have the same shape. More layouts, prettier icons, often a subscription, but still a menu of presets with someone else's idea of what matters. If you just want a nicer version of the same thing, they're fine. If you have a specific picture in your head, you keep hunting.
Describe the weather widget you want
WidgetAI has a built-in weather connector, so the data is there from the first message. You open a chat and describe the tile:
"a small widget with the current temperature, a weather icon, and today's high and low"
The AI builds it and shows you a preview. If it's close but not quite, you keep talking. "Make the temperature much bigger." "Use a soft blue gradient background." "Drop the high and low, just show the temperature and the icon." Every message reshapes the widget. If you're curious what's happening between your message and the result, we wrote up how the AI builds your widget.
If a blank chat feels like too much of a start, the weather templates are the shortcut. There are eight: Current Conditions, Hourly Forecast, Daily Forecast, Precipitation, Sun, Temperature Trend, Air Quality, and Photo Weather, which layers the forecast over one of your own photos. Pick the closest, then reshape it by chatting.
The fields worth asking for
Here's what the weather connector can put on a tile, and the kind of prompt that gets you there.
- Hourly forecast. "Show the next six hours with an icon and temperature for each." On a medium widget this reads as a row; on a small one you'll want three hours at most.
- Daily forecast. "A five-day forecast with highs and lows." Good on medium, cramped on small.
- Chance of rain. "Add the chance of rain for today, and make it bold if it's over 50%." That second half uses rules, which let a value drive its own colour or weight.
- Sunrise and sunset. "Just sunrise and sunset times in large type, nothing else." A surprisingly popular widget, and one the stock widget doesn't offer on its own.
- Air quality. "Show the air quality index and colour it green, amber, or red." This comes from the separate air quality connector, and the AI wires it in for you.
- A temperature chart. "A line chart of the temperature over the next 24 hours." Line, bar, and sparkline charts are all available, so you can pick the one that reads best at a glance.
You can stack these until the tile feels right. A common finished medium widget is current conditions on the left, a short hourly row on the right, and a thin precipitation line underneath, which is a combination no preset we know of ships.
Weather next to the thing you actually care about
This is where building your own widget pays off. Because WidgetAI also reads on-device signals, you can put the forecast next to something personal:
"a medium widget with the weather on the left and my next calendar event on the right"
Now one glance tells you it's raining at 2pm and your meeting is at 2:30. Or pair it with your step count from Apple Health, or your battery, or the time in another city. Calendar and health data are read on your phone with your permission and are never uploaded, so the tile is private even though it mixes sources. We cover the calendar side in more depth in our iPhone calendar widget guide.
Location, and the city you're not in
The built-in weather connector follows your location. The app reads it on-device with your permission and asks for the forecast for those coordinates, so the widget is right wherever you are, and if you haven't shared a location it falls back to a default city until you do. It doesn't currently take a fixed city of its own.
If you want the weather for somewhere you're not, the place you're travelling to next week or wherever family lives, Pro's custom HTTP API connector is the route: point a widget at a weather API with that city's coordinates baked into the URL and ask the AI to lay out the response. Two small widgets side by side, one following you and one pinned to the other city, is a nice setup. The custom HTTP API guide walks through wiring a JSON endpoint to a tile.
How fresh is the forecast, really?
A weather widget doesn't need to be live, but it shouldn't be stale either, so here's the honest picture.
For each widget you pick a refresh interval: every minute, every five minutes, every fifteen, or hourly. For weather, fifteen minutes is plenty. That interval is a target, not a promise. iOS gives each app a limited budget of background refreshes per day and decides when to spend it, so a widget can run a little behind the schedule you asked for. We keep a recent copy of connector data on our servers with a freshness window that fits the source, so when iOS does refresh, it gets a current forecast immediately rather than waiting on a slow upstream call. If you want the whole story on timing, read why your iPhone widget isn't updating.
What it can't do
Widgets on iOS can't be tapped to open a specific hour or day; a tap opens the app. They don't animate rain, and they don't update by the second. Those limits are Apple's, and they apply to every weather widget, including the stock one. WidgetAI builds small and medium widgets today, not large ones. The full list of platform limits is in what iOS widgets can't do.
FAQ
Can I make an iPhone weather widget that only shows the hourly forecast? Yes. Describe it: "a medium widget showing the next six hours with an icon and temperature for each." The AI builds just that, with nothing else on the tile.
Can a weather widget show sunrise and sunset times? Yes. Ask for "sunrise and sunset times in large type" and you get a tile with only those two values, or they can be added to a widget you already have.
Can one widget show the weather and my calendar together? Yes. WidgetAI can put the forecast next to your next calendar event, your steps, or your battery on one tile. Calendar and health data are read on-device with your permission and never uploaded.
How often does the weather widget update? You choose an interval from every minute to hourly; fifteen minutes is a sensible choice for weather. iOS ultimately decides when widgets refresh, so it can run a few minutes behind the schedule you set.
WidgetAI is made for iPhone, iPad and Mac, and it's on the App Store. The free plan gives you 1 widget and 10 AI edits a month, which is enough to build a weather widget and tune it. For more ideas, browse the best iPhone Home Screen widgets for 2026.