Google why Pixel Weather doesn’t have Froggy

Pixel Weather has now been 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 showing up.

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

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

When deciding to create 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 so often, at least during the week and certainly during the day, is immediately ready when you set your phone.”

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

There’s also an easter egg where you can ‘press the current state icon next to the temperature’ when precipitation is falling, to get a ‘beautiful soundscape of the rain’. We don’t see this yet either.

As for other interesting tidbits, Google plans to expand its recently introduced pollen weather block, while the team is proud of the app’s list view of saved locations:

“One of the big disadvantages we encountered as a team is that some weather applications give you a kind of limit on the number of locations you can save and search. So in our list view we really wanted to give you as much freedom as possible. Today there is no upper limit. I think we’re roughly heading towards 30 or 50, which should hopefully be a lot more than the number of saved locations that people need.”