Storm Shield 4+

Storm Shield

Storm Shield Certainly! Here’s the updated
Dear StormShield Team,
As a premium user, I value the advanced features your app provides. To enhance the premium experience further, I suggest incorporating several key improvements. Adding more interactive and customizable radar options would be beneficial, as well as integrating live weather video feeds for real-time updates. Advanced weather analytics, long-range forecasts, and detailed weather maps with additional layers would also be appreciated. Specifically, for lightning features, having more detailed and frequent lightning strike information would be valuable. Additionally, premium users should receive access to critical alerts that can bypass Do Not Disturb settings and other silencing features, ensuring they are notified instantly during urgent situations. It would also be useful if the app supported landscape mode so that when users rotate their iPhones, they can view the map and radar in a horizontal orientation. Furthermore, premium users should receive new features and software updates every month, ensuring they get the latest improvements and features as soon as they are available. Free users will receive updates, but with a delay. This approach would ensure that premium users feel they are fully benefiting from their subscription and taking advantage of all the features StormShield offers

Fantastic, but missing Critical Alerts support

Storm Shield is a fantastic weather alert app, but it is missing support for the Critical Alerts feature. First, Storm Shield provides more precise alerts than other apps, so I don’t get alerts about warnings for storms on the far side of my county and headed away from me. Second, the voice alerts actually speak the alert, so you know without having to look at your phone what the alert is for (e.g., flash flood watch vs tornado warning). The only thing missing is support for Critical Alerts, which allows notifications to break through even when a Focus mode is turned on. Ideally, I would be able to pick for each alert type whether the notification is a Critical Alert or not. (The Red Cross Emergency app let’s me do this.) That way I can decide which alerts break through and wake me up at night when the Sleep focus mode is on (e.g., Tornado Warning but not Severe Thunderstorm Warning).

Developer Response ,

Thanks for your feedback! We'll share your comments with our product and development team as we evaluate options for future app enhancements.

Alerts

I have loved this app for a little over 2 years now I believe. So much so that when our friends from California moved here to Tennessee with no experience in severe weather and were nervous about the weather, I recommended it to them to keep them up to date on watches and warnings and give them a heads up if there was a tornado warning in the middle of the night to get to the basement. Got us all set up with locations picked, alerts turned on and everything and felt good about it, until last night when tornadoes went through the area and there was not ONE alert that popped up for any of us other than the tornado watch that came through like 3 hours after it was issued. We never got any alert for the severe thunderstorm warning or the special weather statement that came and went. And thank the good Lord the radar still worked because I had to watch it all night and just happened to notice the red box pop up when the tornado warning was issued right over their location, and was able to call and tell them to get them and their kids downstairs in time for their area to get hit. People’s roofs were ripped off within a mile or two of their home and they would have had no idea they were even in danger if they’d just trusted this app:( makes me sad because it’s always worked for me and my family in the past and I trusted it too, but none of us (3-4 phones) got any alerts when it really mattered despite double and triple checking all our settings were correct.

Developer Response ,

Thank you for your comments! We're aware that some Apple iPhone or iPad users may have received weather alerts that were delayed in recent severe weather events. We're working with our weather alert provider to investigate this and identify any potential causes. Apple's push notification service, which Storm Shield iOS relies on for delivery of its severe weather alerts, is a "best-effort" service, meaning that Apple makes its best effort to deliver all notifications for iOS devices, but cannot guarantee delivery. To be clear, we're not pointing the finger at Apple's push notification service (we're still investigating); rather, just trying to explain how the push notification process works. Please rest assured that we're working diligently with our weather alerting partner to ensure that everything that we can control is functioning properly, so that future weather alerts will not be delayed. We understand how important it is that alerting works properly, so if you continue to experience missed or late alerts, please reach back out to us.

Your experience also helps reinforce the importance of having multiple alerting sources, as nothing in technology is ever 100% foolproof (although we and our weather technology partner providers strive for that as much as we possibly can). While this experience you had is the exception rather than the rule, we're confident that you'll see this from our past app reviews over the years. Thank you again for helping us strive to be even better!