How to Get iPhone Alerts Before it Rains

If you want to know when it will rain without constantly looking at the weather forecast, here’s how to receive alerts on your iPhone before it rains.

Whether you need to go out and walk the dogs or quickly make a run to the store, it’s preferable to do those things when it’s not raining, so wouldn’t it be awesome if you could receive notifications on your iPhone before it rains so that you have time to do all of those things?

Luckily, there are several ways to receive alerts on your iPhone when rain is incoming. One of the easiest ways is to download a weather app and enable notifications for it, and Dark Sky is one of the best iPhone weather apps out there. Another way is to use IFTTT (If Then Then That) and set up a “recipe” to receive an iPhone notification for when it’s about to rain.

I’ll go over how to set up both methods and from there you can see which one is more suited to your tastes.

How to Get iPhone Alerts Before it Rains

First off, I’ll be showing you how to get rain alerts in Dark Sky. It’s a weather app only available on iPhone and iPad, and it’s a very simple app that gives you the temperature and precipitation levels throughout the day and week.

Dark Sky can be downloaded from the iTunes App Store at a cost of $3.99, which is a bit steep for a weather app, but it’s well worth it.

Once you have it downloaded and installed on your iPhone or iPad, fire up the app and then tap on Notify down in the lower-right corner of the screen. You’ll get a pop-up that tells you to enable notifications for Dark Sky, so be sure to enable that.

Move the slider to the right to set notifications. You can set it so that you only get notifications when there’s heavy rain, moderate rain, or any rain, which can come in handy if you really only want to be alerted of heavy rain coming your way.

Once you set a specific threshold, tap Close at the bottom to save changes. You’ll now receive notifications when it’s almost about to rain in your area.

Another method to receiving iPhone notifications is by using IFTTT, which can send you alerts when there will be rain in the forecast.

To do this, download the IFTTT app from the App Store (it’s a free app). Once it’s downloaded, open it up and create an account.

Next, tap on the mortar and pestle icon in the top-right corner of the screen and then tap on the plus icon in the same location. From here, you can browse recipes that other users have made and even create your own by tapping on the big plus icon in the lower-right corner.

When you tap on the plus icon, you can begin to create your own recipe and customize it to your liking. Go ahead and click on the first plus icon where it says Start Here and then swipe all the way to the end of the horizontal icon list until you see the Weather icon. You’ll then get a list of different actions. Unfortunately, IFTTT can’t notify you of any incoming rain when it happens, but rather tell you if there will be rain in the forecast tomorrow.

With that said, go ahead and select Tomorrow’s forecast calls for. You’ll need to activate the channel before you can continue, which basically just means putting in your location for weather information.

The next step is to select a condition to be on the lookout for. In this case, it’s rain, which should already be selected. Go ahead and tap Next.

Click on the red plus icon next to tell the app how to notify you. Scroll through the list of icons until you come across iOS Notifications. Then tap on Send a notification. From there, hit Finish and you’ll be good to go!