Your car is across town with the top off.
Top Down watches that spot and buzzes your phone when rain is heading for it. You get a heads up so you have enough time to walk back and put the top back up.
For iPhone, coming to the App Store. No account, and nothing running on your phone.
Top Down
Rain likely in ~35 min
Light rain is forecast to reach where you parked.
The whole app, in one afternoon
You took the top off this morning and your car is sitting three miles away outside the office or at the trailhead or wherever you ended up. The sky where you currently are is clear.
Your phone buzzes: Rain likely in ~35 min.
You walk back and put the top on before it starts.
How it works
01Flip the switch when you park
It takes the car's position where you are when you turned it on. Flip it somewhere else and you are watching the wrong place, so do it standing at the car.
02Put your phone away
Nothing keeps running. No background location, no app left open. The watching happens on a server so it doesn't drain your battery.
03Go back when it tells you
When rain is forecast to reach your car inside your warning window, your phone buzzes. If it keeps closing in, it buzzes again.
Who it is for
Anyone who leaves a vehicle open to the sky and then walks away from it.
- Soft top off
- Doors off
- Convertible down
- Targa or T-tops out
- Hardtop in the garage
- Sunroof left open
The forecast that matters is the one where the car is, not where you are currently located. That is the whole reason this is not just the weather app you already have.
What it does not do
Top Down gives you a heads-up. It cannot give you a guarantee and it's important to understand this before you lean on it.
- It watches the pin, not the vehicle.
- Top Down has no way to sense where your car actually is. It monitors the coordinates you gave it. Start a session while you are somewhere else and you will be watching the wrong place.
- Sessions end.
- You choose how long, up to 24 hours. When a session ends the monitoring stops, whether or not the top is back on.
- Forecasts are wrong sometimes.
- Rain can arrive early, stall out, or miss you entirely. Alerts can also be delayed or lost: phone off, no signal, notifications switched off, or an outage somewhere between the server and your phone.
- Precise timing is not available everywhere.
- Minute-level rain timing covers the United States, United Kingdom, Ireland, Japan and Australia. Elsewhere Top Down falls back to coarser data, and warnings there are rougher and arrive with less notice. The app tells you when you are in that case.
It is a nudge to go check. Keep an eye on the sky anyway.
What it knows about you
No account
No signup, no name, no email address. What you do in the app hangs off an opaque identifier for your installation and nothing else.
One location, once
Your position is captured at the moment you flip the switch. The app asks only for “While Using” location and never for background access, so it cannot follow you.
The forecast is fuzzed
Your coordinates are rounded to a roughly 5 km grid square, and the forecast is requested for the center of that square. The weather provider never receives the spot where you actually parked.
Ended sessions and their alerts are deleted after 30 days by a scheduled job, not by policy alone. The full detail is in the privacy policy.