SAN JOSE, Calif. — Nimbly, the weather app installed on an estimated 400 million phones, quietly retired the phrase “Partly Cloudy” on Tuesday and replaced it with “Sky Is Doing Something,” ending a decade-long standoff with the meteorological community.

The change appeared in version 14.2, buried in release notes between a fix for a widget that displayed the wrong time zone and an update to the app’s mascot, a smiling raindrop named Drizzy. It was not announced.

“We had been receiving feedback for years,” said Dolores Pemberton-Achterberg, Nimbly’s Director of Atmospheric Wording. “Meteorologists kept telling us that ‘partly cloudy’ describes everything from a single wisp over Nebraska to a sky that looks like a bruised mattress. We listened. Eventually.”

The new descriptor applies whenever the sky is neither clearly sunny nor clearly overcast, a condition that internal data shows covers 71 percent of all daylight hours on Earth.

Forecasters welcomed the update. “For years we have been asked to summarize the sky in two words, and for years we have been lying,” said Dr. Anselm Voorhees-Kapoor, a senior fellow in Cumulus Accountability at the Midwestern Institute for Looking Up. “‘Sky Is Doing Something’ is true in every case. I have checked it against every sky I have ever seen.”

Users reported a similar sense of relief. Marcus Tolliver, 38, said he had spent years obeying the app’s forecast and then getting rained on in what it had called “Mostly Sunny.”

“I looked at my phone, and it said the sky was doing something, and I looked up, and the sky was doing something,” Tolliver said. “It was the first time the two matched.”

Not everyone is satisfied. A coalition of golf course operators has asked Nimbly to clarify whether “something” includes rain, citing a rise in confused tee-time cancellations. The company said that the phrase “intentionally covers all possibilities” and that it would not be taking questions about which ones.

The update is part of a broader overhaul. “Mostly Cloudy” has become “Sky Is Doing More of Something,” and “Scattered Showers” now reads “Water, Probably, at Some Point.” A spokesperson confirmed that “Fair” will be removed entirely, as no one has ever known what it meant.

“If you want a forecast that is wrong, there are plenty of apps for that. We wanted one that is merely vague.”

Pemberton-Achterberg offered the quote as the company’s new internal philosophy and said it was likely to be printed on a mug.

Early data suggest the change has improved user trust. Nimbly’s own surveys found that confidence in its forecasts rose 40 percent after the update, though the company noted the survey asked only whether respondents agreed that “the sky is doing something.”

At press time, Nimbly’s engineers were reportedly debating a fix for the app’s hourly view, which still lists the temperature as “Feels Like” a number that no one can independently confirm.