Apple’s Weather app for iPhone, iPad and Mac soon will incorporate local news sourced from the Apple News service.

In the latest beta of iOS 16.2, certain cities have an additional section for weather news, slotted between the 10-day forecast and the air quality meter. On iPadOS and macOS Ventura, this section occupies an even larger widget in the corner.

Apple News in the Weather app

The news section isn’t a permanent fixture. From what beta testers have ascertained, it only appears in major cities — and only when Apple News finds a relevant story about the weather.

If the city has a severe weather alert issued by the National Weather Service (like for flash floods, a bad thunderstorm or a blizzard) at the very top, the news section won’t appear.

Apple appears to be carefully testing this feature — it seems very flippant as to whether it’ll show up or not.

Apple Weather app in iOS 15

Apple’s new Weather app, introduced in iOS 15, brought a top-to-bottom modular redesign that uses SwiftUI. Widely praised, the update also added a precipitation radar map, a long-requested feature.

This year, the widget-like design worked well when scaling up the interface for the iPad and the Mac. Apple also added detailed graphs — you can tap on any day, any metric or any section of the app to see a nice pop-up view offering more information on a timeline.

Apple seems intent on pushing Apple News features into many of its stock apps, including the Stocks app. Rumors suggest Apple is working on adding editorial content to Maps, too. And, yes, the news content will bring ads with it.

Apple’s drive to add News content to other parts of the ecosystem could be in response to reports that publishers are unhappy with the performance of the news platform. The big trouble, though, is that even paid readers are unhappy with Apple News.