Google on why Pixel Weather doesn’t have Froggy

Pixel Weather has now widely rolled out to older devices, and this week’s Made by Google Podcast talks about the app’s design and why Froggy isn’t featured.

For over 300 major cities around the world, Pixel Weather shows generated AI imagery of landmarks and skylines as the background. Google wanted to “make the cityscapes a little bit more subtle in the background” to “keep that data front and center.” In comparison, Google Weather prominently features the frog mascot just below the temperature. 

The Pixel Weather team did discuss Froggy, but ultimately didn’t include the mascot because it didn’t fit the app’s subtle aesthetic: “It was a tough decision, because as a character, you see basically half the population loves him, and half the population has a different feeling of him. And we didn’t want to only cater to one side.”

In deciding to make the app, Google found that a weather app “ranks third as the most used and most important application on your device”:

“It’s time to really give that out-of-the-box premium experience to our users. So that something that you check this many times, at least during the week and definitely during the day, is ready right when you set up your phone.”

The podcast also mentioned an Animation haptics feature where you’ll feel a “vibration that matches the density of the rain in the current conditions.” Google’s support article also mentions this feature as adding “vibration to the Pixel Weather background animations,” but it does not appear to be live yet on Pixel 9 devices we’ve checked.

There’s also an easter egg where you can “press on the icon for the current condition next to the temperature” when there’s precipitation to get a “beautiful soundscape of the rain.” We’re also not yet seeing this.

In terms of other interesting tidbits, Google does plan to expand the recently introduced pollen weather block, while the team is proud of the app’s list view of saved locations:

“One of the big drawbacks that we were seeing just as a team is that some weather applications give you sort of like a cut line of how many locations you can save and look through. So in our list view, we really wanted to give you as much freedom as possible. Today, there is not an upper limit. I think we roughly track towards 30 or 50, which should be hopefully way beyond how many saved locations people need”