Metarize

Metarize is a powerful tool to consult two iconic aviation weather products — METARs and TAFs — and use them for a variety of missions beyond aviation.

It leverages to the fullest these amazing weather products:
- Their compact, very quick to read format
- Their extremely high quality, on which millions of lives depend
- Their global availability in a standard format

… and provides features to make them useful for a variety of critical missions
- Push notifications
- Discovery of local stations (using GPS or a map location)
- Monitoring and reporting of the integrity and recency of the data
- Offline support – refresh data in the background so it’s available to consult when offline
- Part 107 readiness indication
- Decoding assistance, to help learn the format (it’s well worth the effort!)
- Home screen widget for quick access

More subtle design goals – some of these are still actively being worked on:
Chain of trust – report any element that puts the integrity or recency of what it displayed in question
Latency – use the lowest latency source possible
Resiliency – make the app resilient to failures
Security-minded – require no permissions beyond internet access (optionally use more permissions, see below)
Tactical-friendliness – low light color scheme

Permissions:
- Internet – required, to download data
- Location – optional, to automatically display nearby stations
- Notifications – optional, for push notifications

Background-fetching (offline support) – this feature makes the app periodically (every 15 minutes) download an up to date METAR or TAF for each favorite station/product combination. If the device goes offline, the last data fetched will be available.