App Store Keywords for Weather Apps: When the Category Name Is the Keyword

Estimated volume / estimated difficulty (0-100). English phrases in every storefront.

Apple's advice is not to repeat words that already appear in the app name, subtitle or category in the keyword field, and the primary and optional secondary categories are indexed by search. In Weather this means "weather" is already covered if you choose the category. The two phrases that include it ("weather radar", "weather widget") are two of the three hardest on the grid, while "hurricane tracker", "air quality" and "tide times" are all cheaper. That is a correlation between phrase shape and difficulty, and a plausible reason is that the generic phrases are what established apps compete for. The practical reading is to use the free keyword bytes on the other words in the phrase. Category names in keywords walks through the byte arithmetic and a check you can run on your own app.

Weather sits within a point or two of the median on every measure, except the exact-title share: 34% against 43.5%. It is low in part because the phrase itself is often not in a Weather app's name; in France only 22% of top-10 names contained every word. The genre match is excellent (93.3%), with News at 5.0% and Health & Fitness at 1.7% of the US results, where air-quality results spill over. The mapping is still approximate across the study.

• Pick phrases that name a hazard or a data type. "Hurricane tracker" is hard only in the US, and "air quality" and "tide times" have difficulty at or below 29 even there. If your app covers one of them, say so explicitly in the subtitle.
• Be wary of zero scores. "Tide times" shows difficulty 0 in four storefronts, and "air quality" 0 in two. Zero difficulty with low volume can mean a dead phrase; how to spot dead keywords explains how to tell.
• Judge by storefront. The same hazard is a US story or a local story depending on the phrase, so match each term to a market you actually serve.
• Look at siblings. Trip-planning forecasts overlap Travel; breaking alerts sit near News; and route-aware conditions overlap Navigation.

Six generic English phrases per category, queried through the iTunes Search API (entity=software, limit=25) in the US, GB, DE, JP, FR and BR, top 10 results per query analysed; Weather is 36 queries and 360 slots, fetched on 2026-11-01. See the research methodology, the research hub and how we measure. Data: category CSV.

LocalASO is a Mac app that checks volume and difficulty in 52 storefronts, researching each in its own language. It is a $29 one-time purchase, and the free download needs a license key to run. See pricing.