An unidentified weather app added 150k installs in a week and hit #2 on the Spain weather chart

Weather Forecast: Live & Daily was listed in late July, and installs ramped up in late October: across 10-29 to 11-06, global installs rose from 162k to 310k, while it charted on the Weather free chart in 27 countries: #2 in Spain, #3 in Mexico, #10 in the US. The product has nothing new, and users aren't coming for it specifically. It's one more product on a mature weather-category assembly line: register under a US company account, buy installs in cheaper countries, and earn it back through ads.

The most "helpful" review in the comments, written by someone who hasn't used it yet

11-06 Opening its Mexico store page, the top-listed review with 21 "helpful" votes is from Socorro Parra, written in Oct 17, 5 stars: "muchas gracias esperando sea muy buena aplicacion" (Thank you very much, hoping it's a really good app). She just installed it and doesn't know yet whether it's any good.

The other reviews on this page are mostly the same: "muy buena", "buena", "perfecta", "genial", and "muy buena aplicación que dios los bendiga siempre" (very good app, may God always bless you). One review just says "DASQW". In Oct 28 someone asked: "De momento muy bien, ¿como hago para quitar los anuncios?" (So far so good, how do I remove the ads?)

The only long review is a 24-star from Oct 1 by user Nestitor, in Argentine slang: "Just installed it and a box popped up saying my version is too old, with only two options: update, and 'sí'. No other choice. Forcing it like this? Nope, bye!!!"

Several hundred ratings and about twenty written reviews, all just a few words. Not one talks about whether the forecasts are accurate or whether the radar is useful. That's the typical profile of bought users: they tapped an ad, installed, left a positive rating in passing, and never come back to say anything.

What it is

An ordinary Android weather app: live conditions, hourly and weekly forecasts, radar maps, severe weather alerts. The English title is "Weather Forecast: Live & Daily", and in Spanish-speaking markets it's "Pronóstico del tiempo" (weather forecast), exactly the words Spanish users type in the store. The description packs every disaster it can into the alerts: storms, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, plus earthquakes and tsunamis (Google Play store page, 11-06).

Free, no in-app purchases, and the store listing says "Contains ads". The data safety section says it shares app activity and device IDs with third parties, and the data is not encrypted. All of its money comes from ads.

How much it grew

Google Play's public install counts update every few days, so averages are more reliable. Over these 8 days the average was about 18k a day.

Two numbers tell the story. First, for every 1,000 new installs, only 1 new rating: installs grew 148k, but ratings only added 142. Second, it only charted in the Weather category, and never made the overall or Top Grossing chart of any country. Spain went from #8 to #2, the UK from #26 to #7, Japan from #27 to #9, and the US from #17 to #10 (Google Play Weather category Top Free chart, 10-29 to 11-06).

The bar in the Weather category is low: a few thousand extra daily installs can move it up several spots. So "charting in 27 countries at once" looks impressive but may not reflect much spending.

Where users come from

Almost certainly paid acquisition (inference, high confidence). The reasoning is by elimination: searching its name on TikTok returns only weather content like Fox Weather, with nothing about this app; no one mentions it on X; and the only pages findable online are chart aggregator listings. It has no word of mouth and no content driving traffic, yet it's rising in 27 countries at once. Only paid buying explains that.

I couldn't find where it was bought. It doesn't show up in the Meta or Google ad transparency tools under either the developer name or the package name. The common pattern for weather packages like this is ads run through an agency's account, or placed on in-game ad networks like AppLovin, Mintegral or Unity, which outsiders can't search.

Why it ranks highest in Spanish-speaking markets: single installs are cheap in Latin America, where the same money buys more people in countries like Mexico and Argentina, and the weather charts are easy to climb. The reviewers fit this profile: they write blessings and rate based on first impressions (inference). Once it reaches the top spots, store exposure brings in some organic downloads too.

Store search was optimized too. The Spanish title is simply "Pronóstico del tiempo", the same as another similar app on Mexico's chart. The English title stacks Weather, Forecast, Live and Daily together. The description mentions earthquake and tsunami alerts to catch searches for "alerta sísmica" (earthquake alert).

The rating may have been managed. Overall the app sits at 4.4 stars, the Mexico store shows 4.7, and only 40 reviews carry 1 stars. Right after install it pops a forced-update prompt. A common tactic is to ask inside the app "Do you like it?" and only send people who say yes to the store to leave a rating (inferred, not verified).

Where the money comes from

Weather apps are good for ad businesses: people check them daily or more, there are notifications and widgets, and splash, interstitial and feed ads all fit. As long as the money a user brings in through ads before uninstalling exceeds the cost of acquiring them, you can keep buying.

It stayed small for two and a half months after launch and only scaled up in late October, while the version number jumped from 1.0.8 to 1.0.12 over the same period (the version numbers in user reviews). This rhythm looks like testing first, adjusting ad placements, and adding budget once the math worked out (inference). How much a user costs to acquire and how much ad revenue each one brings in are invisible from outside. "It's still scaling up" is the only evidence the math works.

Who made it

The developer on the store is Affirming Voices, and the legal entity is Affirming Voices Speech Therapy LLC, a company registered in Utah as a "speech therapy" business, yet the phone number carries a Kentucky area code. Its website claims it "provides end-to-end computer system design services", which doesn't match the company name or the business. It's clearly a template site. The app's own website, weatherforcastlive.org (missing an e in forecast), doesn't load on the homepage, leaving only a privacy policy from July.

Two more apps sit under the same account: a casual game with a random-letter package name, Fern Tide (50+ downloads), and a recently updated Daily Weather (10+ downloads). The pattern is to age an account with a small game first, run the main package at volume, and keep a similar package in reserve to swap in if the main one gets banned. This is a common setup for going-global tools teams using bought or rented company accounts; on Reddit's Android developer forums people have been offered Play developer accounts for $50 a month.

Who the real team is can't be determined.

Who it's competing with

On weather, it has no advantage at all. The built-in weather apps (Xiaomi Weather with 2.35B installs, ColorOS with 1.65B), Google Weather and Apple Weather are all free and ad-free. AccuWeather, The Weather Channel and WetterOnline have their own meteorological data and brands, with tens of millions to hundreds of millions of installs.

Its real rivals are the people on the same assembly line, using the same playbook, some of them a year or two earlier:

(Google Play installs, 11-06)

The app from the individual-name account in the third row also uses "Pronóstico del tiempo" as its Spanish title. It launched 7 months earlier and has already reached 3.1M. This year the weather category has also seen a batch of similarly named new packages: Live Weather (July), Daily Weather Alarm (August), Great Weather Alarm (September), Weather (late October)... Most developer names are random personal names or shell companies.

So nobody is copying it. It's just one of the batch that everyone is copying.

If it were you

Verdict: This is a mature, crowded paid-acquisition arbitrage category, not a product opportunity. It shows that "weather app + ads + cheap-country UA" still pencils out today, but not that it will pencil out for you. There are already five or six ten-million-install clones, and new ones keep joining the same ad inventory.

Who it's for: Teams already running Android utility apps for ad monetization, with ad network accounts, who can calculate CPI and ARPU per user, and who can live with the account getting banned at any time.

Who it's not for: Indie devs who want to build a weather app people genuinely love. The users here aren't looking for a good product. Also not for people who won't run ads or who are counting on organic store traffic, or people who just want to maintain a clean developer account.

How to do it: Stop building generic English or Spanish weather apps. There are three things worth copying. First, pick your countries: count how many of these apps sit in the local Weather category's top 20, and roughly how many installs the top few get per day. Pick a language that isn't saturated yet and where installs are cheap. Second, localize the title and search terms: use the words locals actually search for in the title, not a translated English name. Third, put emergency use cases in the value prop: earthquake, typhoon and heavy-rain warnings raise open rates and make notification permission easier to get. If you want to last longer, go niche: fishing tides, agriculture, travel, air quality, or a specific country's official alerts. Users who check it every day have a reason to pay, and to see ads.

How to acquire users: In-game ad networks (AppLovin, Mintegral, Unity-type) and the Meta Audience Network. Start with a small budget in low-cost countries like Latin America or Southeast Asia, and check whether ad revenue per user within 7 days covers what you paid to acquire them. Scale only once it does.

Timing: Weather demand is seasonal. Open rates are higher in the Northern Hemisphere winter and during typhoon and hurricane seasons. The window for this type of app also depends on when Google clears batches of fake or linked accounts. If you test, get your numbers within these few months, don't bet on a year.

Signs you've misread it: ① If over the next month or two it stalls or gets pulled alongside the other new clones, the traffic has gotten more expensive or been cleaned out. ② If it climbs to several million with no new channel, the category has more room than you'd think. ③ If you test in a new language and find that the top ten in that country's weather chart still gets in with only a few hundred installs, you've found a market this pipeline hasn't covered yet.