# TWRadar: Taiwan Weather Radar — Lightning, Typhoon & Closures > Lightning, Typhoon & Closures (iPhone/iPad app by Andrew Lih.) - Source: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/twradar-taiwan-weather-radar/id6794384505 (this page in markdown: same URL + `.md`) - Developer: [Andrew Lih](https://appshunter.io/developer/6794384507) - Category: Weather, News - Price: Free with in-app purchases - Age rating: 4+ - Requires: iOS 17.0 · 20 MB - Languages: American English, Chinese (Simplified, China), Chinese (Traditional, Taiwan) - Released: 2026-08-25 - Data updated: 2026-09-20 - User reviews in markdown: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/twradar-taiwan-weather-radar/id6794384505/reviews.md ## What is TWRadar? TWRadar turns Taiwan CWA open data into a radar time machine on Apple Maps: drag the timeline back up to 72 hours to see where the rain came from. Optional alerts cover lightning, typhoons and CWA typhoon warnings. Native SwiftUI + MapKit, not a webview. Free, no ads, no account, no tracking. FEATURES • Radar overlay: Composite reflectivity (~1.25 km), updated every 10 minutes, opacity 15 to 100%, four basemaps. • Satellite clouds: Infrared cloud cover across East Asia, updated every 10 minutes, on the same 72-hour timeline as radar. • 72-hour time machine: 6 to 72 hour ranges, 1x to 32x playback, archive gaps hatched not hidden. • Lightning overlay: Cloud-to-ground and intra-cloud strikes on the same timeline, updated every 5 minutes. • Typhoon tracks: Past path plus CWA's own forecast cone, coloured by intensity (Taiwan or US scale). • Typhoon events: Every recorded storm's full path, free; Radar Pass Plus replays its radar where we have the frames. • Lightning alerts: Notified when a strike lands near a point you pick; tap to map it, long-press to preview. • Typhoon alerts: Eight choices, from CWA warnings to a storm reaching the radar; all free except the daily digest, no background location. • Work and class suspension alerts (Beta): The official Directorate-General of Personnel Administration page, relayed within minutes, though an alert can be late, wrong or missing and the announcement itself governs. Free and off by default. • Tap-to-query dBZ: Tap the map to read a cell's strength as a number (opt-in). • 10 color palettes, Original the default, plus seven styled ramps. • Widgets: Home and Lock Screen radar, lightning and dBZ, each with its own location, zoom, style and opacity. • Radar Loop: An animated widget looping the last 1, 2, 3, 6 or 12 hours of radar; needs Radar Pass Plus, also on CarPlay. • Traditional Chinese and English, Taipei timestamps, 11 app icons. DATA Taiwan CWA open data: composite radar reflectivity (O-A0059-001), lightning (O-A0039-001), typhoon tracks (W-C0034-005), typhoon warnings (W-C0034-001). CWA serves only the latest frame; the 72-hour history is ours. Suspension alerts use the Directorate-General of Personnel Administration's open data, published as a web page rather than a machine-readable feed, so an alert can be late, wrong or missing; the official announcement is what counts. RADAR PASS The free tier shows the last 6 hours. Radar Pass Plus unlocks the full 72 hours, past typhoons' radar replay and Radar Loop's animation, as a monthly or yearly subscription (both with a free trial) or a one-time lifetime purchase. Typhoon tracks and every recorded storm's path stay free. The tip jar just buys us a drink; it unlocks nothing. PRIVACY No data collected. No accounts, no tracking, no third-party SDKs. TWRadar is for general reference only. Do not rely on it for emergency response, aviation, marine or other safety-critical decisions; refer to official CWA and government bulletins. Subscriptions: Monthly and Yearly Radar Pass Plus are billed to your Apple Account at purchase confirmation and renew automatically unless auto-renew is turned off at least 24 hours before the current period ends. Lifetime is a one-time purchase and does not renew. Manage or cancel anytime in your App Store account settings. Privacy Policy: https://twradar.app/privacy.html Terms of Use: https://twradar.app/terms.html ## Pricing and in-app purchases Base price: Free. **Subscriptions** | Subscription | Price | Period | | --- | --- | --- | | Radar Pass Plus — Yearly | $9.99 | per year | | Radar Pass Plus — Monthly | $0.99 | per month | **One-time purchases** | Purchase | Price | Type | | --- | --- | --- | | Radar Pass Plus — Lifetime | $29.99 | one-time | | A little something | $0.99 | one-time | | Generous tip | $12.99 | one-time | | Buy me a coffee | $2.99 | one-time | | Buy me a meal | $5.99 | one-time | | Extraordinarily generous tip | $29.99 | one-time | ## Version history (last 5 releases) ### 1.7.1 — 2026-09-19 • Liquid Glass. The timeline panel, map tool buttons, legend, What's New card and Radar Pass screen now use iOS 26/27's real Liquid Glass, matching your system Liquid Glass and accessibility settings automatically. No visible change on iOS 17 through 25. ### 1.7 — 2026-09-19 • Satellite clouds. A new cloud layer under the radar shows live cloud cover across East Asia. Tap the satellite button in the map's tool column to turn it on or off; press and hold to adjust its transparency. • Smoother satellite playback. Frames are cached and pre-fetched like radar, with a buffering bar while older frames catch up. • Radar Pass free trial badges. Monthly and yearly rows now show when a plan includes a free trial. ### 1.6 — 2026-09-11 • Choose your wind and pressure units. Settings > Units: wind in m/s, km/h, mph, knots or Beaufort force; pressure in hPa, mbar, mmHg, inHg or kPa. • Central pressure on the map. The storm chip and every tapped track point now show the storm's central pressure. • Intensity at a glance. The typhoon list tags each storm with its peak category, on the scale you chose. • Alerts no longer replace each other: every typhoon alert, daily digest and suspension notice stays in Notification Center until you clear it. • Nearby lightning alerts get their own Settings screen, alongside Typhoon alerts and Work & class suspensions. ### 1.5 — 2026-09-08 • New (Beta): work and class suspension alerts (停班停課). Get notified minutes after a county announces a suspension, straight from the official Directorate-General of Personnel Administration page. Follow a whole county or one township; "use my current location" picks it for you. • A suspension for your whole county or your chosen township arrives as a Time Sensitive alert. If you follow only a county, closures of single townships, villages or schools arrive as one quiet daily summary, so a busy day never buzzes a dozen times. • Tap a suspension alert to see that county's full board, your own area first, with the wording exactly as the government page states it. • Honest about timing and about the source: the official page runs a few minutes behind the county's own announcement, typically 5 to 12, so this is confirmation, not breaking news. It is a web page rather than a data feed, so if it changes an alert can be wrong or missing; the official announcement is what counts. • Only the county and township code you chose is stored; using your current location reads it once and keeps nothing. ### 1.4 — 2026-09-05 • Typhoon alerts are now eight separate choices instead of one switch. Find them under Settings, Notifications, Typhoon alerts. • New: Taiwan warning alerts. Get notified when the CWA issues a typhoon warning for Taiwan, when it is upgraded to a land warning, and when it is lifted. Three separate choices, relayed from the CWA's own warning bulletin. • New: hear only the storm news you want. A storm reaching the app's radar view, a depression strengthening into a typhoon, a typhoon strengthening into a moderate or severe one, or the CWA starting to track a new system. That last one was the only alert there used to be, and it fires a dozen or more times a season, mostly for distant depressions. • New: a daily update while a typhoon is active, with where it is and how strong (with a Radar Pass). • Apart from the daily update, each alert fires once, when the moment happens. The CWA reissues a warning in force every hour or three; only a change is notified. • Typhoon alerts now show a map when held. Press and hold a "CWA is tracking a new system" alert and it expands into a map with a typhoon icon at the storm's position, its forecast track and CWA's forecast cone (the 70% probability envelope), with Taiwan in frame so you can see where it is relative to you. As everywhere in the app, the forecast is CWA's own published one, never ours. • Tapping a typhoon alert now opens the storm the way picking it from the Typhoon events list does: its path is drawn and framed, the storm's name, dates and peak intensity sit at the top with a close button, and if the storm has crossed radar range its radar replay starts (with a Radar Pass; without one the pass sheet opens over the drawn path). A tap used to draw only the path. • A lightning alert now keeps its strike marker however old the alert is, whether you tap it or hold it. Alerts over an hour old used to drop the marker and leave a bare circle. • Fixed: a storm the CWA stopped tracking and later picked up again could be recorded twice, and announce itself twice. --- *Data collected daily from the US App Store and indexed by [AppsHunter](https://appshunter.io/). User reviews are verbatim App Store reviews. Ratings, prices and chart positions refresh continuously; this snapshot is from 2026-09-20.*