Bowcast support
Help with forecasts, location, alerts, reports, and privacy. The iPhone app is free on the App Store; the website at bowcast.app runs the same forecast.
It said 25% and I saw nothing
That is the ordinary case, not a fault. 25% is a weighted average across about forty forecast members, each scored on how well rain and sunlight line up in the same sky at the same time. A member scoring high is a model finding the ingredients, not a rainbow anyone saw.
Two more things sit between the number and the sky. The reading belongs to a place and to an interval, so a shower that arrives twenty minutes late, or five kilometres east, is a miss even when the forecast was sound. And a rainbow is only visible if you are looking away from a low sun, which is why Bowcast gives you a direction and a window rather than only a number.
The honest part: these percentages are not yet calibrated against real sightings. They are labelled Estimated chance rather than probability precisely because nobody has yet measured how often a Bowcast 25% becomes a rainbow. Telling us what you saw, or did not see, is the only thing that fixes that.
Why have I never received an alert?
- Qualifying windows are genuinely rare in most places. Long quiet stretches are the normal case, not a fault.
- Alerts fire at your chosen threshold. The app defaults to 25% and lets you set anything from 5% to 95%.
- Only a fresh Estimated chance qualifies. A Conditions score /100, a saved forecast and a stale forecast never trigger an alert.
- Confirm notifications are allowed for Bowcast in device settings.
- Open Bowcast online now and then so the push token can refresh.
Why a percentage sometimes and a score out of 100 other times?
They are two different measurements, and the label tells you which one you are reading.
Estimated chance is a weighted average across about forty ensemble members, each scored on how well sunlit rain lines up. Conditions score /100 is the fallback, used when the ensemble does not answer. It ranks how favourable conditions look, it is not a chance, and it never carries a percent sign. If you are seeing a score out of 100, the ensemble was unavailable for that place at that moment.
Why does it want my location?
To know which sky to read. Bowcast rounds your position to about a kilometre before it asks for a forecast, so what leaves your phone is an area rather than an address. It travels with no name, no account and no advertising identifier.
Access is foreground only. Bowcast never asks for background location. You can skip the permission entirely and search for a place instead. There is deliberately no default city: a confident forecast for somewhere you are not is worse than no forecast.
How do I delete my data?
- Turning alerts off requests deletion of your registration from the server.
- Removing the app deletes saved forecasts, preferences and any unsent reports held on the device.
- Seen and Not seen reports are account-free and carry no direct account or device identifier. Each one has a random report ID. If you kept that ID, email it and we will delete that report, and it will be excluded when the model is next trained.
The privacy policy is the full account of what is stored and for how long.
Forecast will not load
Check your network connection, then try again. After one successful request, the app can show its last saved forecast with an explicit saved, offline, or stale label rather than a blank screen.
Contact
Email i@shamseddin.net. Include the app version, device model, and a short description of what happened. Do not include an exact location or push token.