The popular Weather Flow app for Windows Phone has died. Its developer pulled the app from the Windows Phone Store because of insufficient revenue. The data the app uses costs the developer too much money and the app wasn't making enough. It's a big blow to Windows Phone users everywhere who loved the app.
It's the nature of the beast with Windows Phone at this point. Until Microsoft can attract more users developers will struggle.
"My weather provider - Weather Underground - hiked their prices to a level where the app started making a significant loss that I couldn't fund after a while. Their weather data is expensive - $1,500 / month and the app was bringing in significantly less revenue then this, the last month it was $500, with the purchases also starting to go down. After a while the difference got too much to keep paying out of pocket without much hope of breaking even (not making a loss) again. Unfortunately weather data is expensive with lots of hits per day (Weather Flow was making almost 1M requests/day due to live tile updates) and I can't see a cheap or free, but decent alternative data source."
It's the nature of the beast with Windows Phone at this point. Until Microsoft can attract more users developers will struggle.