With our 50 Essential iOS Apps series, the goal was to help you find some of the best apps for iPhone and iPad. Picking the finest offerings from the more than 2.2 million iOS apps in Apple’s App Store proved challenging. But we highlighted apps that offer excellent features or make life easier in various ways.

To wrap up the series, we’ve sorted the apps by category to make the list easier to browse. We’re also showcasing Cult of Mac readers’ alternatives to our picks.

(You’ll find reader faves linked at the end of this post. That’s especially helpful since one of our must-have apps is about to die an unceremonious death.)

This week we check the weather with two great updates to old favorites, and record our thoughts on the never-ending 2018 summer in Day One’s great new voice notes feature.

Another day, another new weather app. Dark Sky was already a big favorite, thanks to its hyper-local forecasts that tell you when it will rain outside your door, down to the minute.

Well, the app just got updated to version 6.0. According to the Dark Sky developers, it’s a completely new app — an update in name only. Let’s take a look.

There are roughly a billion weather apps on the App Store, and several them are very good indeed. But my current favorite is Hello Weather, which was just updated to get some great international features, as well as some awesome radar maps. It’s so great-looking, and so easy to use, that it’s been my go-to weather app since I discovered it.

Weather can be exciting, but checking the weather rarely is. Regardless of what’s going on outside, Carrot Weather makes checking the forecast hilarious and fun. Better than that, Carrot Weather offers an Apple Watch app that is best in class for the platform.

Weather is something we all deal with, and an accurate idea of what’s coming can help inform your day-to-day decisions. With the Dark Sky Weather app, you can know exactly when to expect a change in weather conditions.

Unlike many of its competitors, Dark Sky goes deeper than a simple high-level summary of the day’s forecast. It offers hyperlocal forecasts for your exact address, with down-to-the-minute notifications about changing weather conditions. Uncannily accurate, it’s a shining ray of light in the storm of weather apps.