SEATTLE—FairSky, the weather app installed on an estimated 140 million phones, released an update Tuesday that removes every temperature, radar map, hourly graph, and precipitation percentage from its interface and replaces them with a single animated hand gesture.

The gesture, which the company calls “the Verdict,” is a slow, decisive shrug that plays on a loop against a soft gradient background. Users who open the app at 6 a.m. receive the same shrug as those who open it during a tornado warning, though the shrug is said to be “somewhat firmer” in the latter case.

“People were never reading the 40 percent,” said Dolores Wintergarten-Pike, FairSky’s Vice President of Atmospheric Reassurance. “They’d see 40 percent and just stare at it, like it owed them something. A shrug resolves that tension. It says, ‘Maybe, and I’m at peace with it.’”

According to the company, the Verdict outperformed 14 competing designs in focus groups, including a thumbs-up, a raised eyebrow, and a photograph of a man looking out a window. Participants described the shrug as “honest,” “relatable,” and “exactly what my uncle would do.”

Early reactions have been mixed. Some users praised the cleaner interface, while others reported being soaked on the way to work. FairSky said the latter group had “misunderstood the shrug,” which it maintains was always a statement about the sky and never about the user’s decision to leave the house without a jacket.

Dr. Ignatius Brockhampton-Voss, a senior fellow at the Institute for Applied Vagueness at the University of Lower Nebraska, said the redesign reflects a broader shift in consumer technology. “For decades, apps pretended to know things,” he said. “That created enormous pressure. The shrug is the first honest forecast since the invention of the almanac, and almanacs at least had the decency to be wrong in print.”

“A number can be wrong. A shrug can only be interpreted.”

The line, attributed to Wintergarten-Pike, now appears on the app’s loading screen.

The update also removes the “feels like” temperature, which the company called “a lie we told ourselves,” and the pollen count, which it described as “a lot, generally.” A premium tier, FairSky Plus, will add a second gesture, a slow nod, for $4.99 a month. Executives declined to say what the nod means, only that “subscribers will know.”

Meteorologists have responded with cautious professional interest. At the National Forecast Standards Board, a spokesperson confirmed that a shrug is “technically within the margin of error for most extended outlooks” and noted that the agency has quietly used one in budget meetings since 1987.

Not all users have adapted. Tuesday afternoon, several FairSky customers reportedly held their phones up toward the sky and shrugged back, a behavior the company says it “neither anticipated nor discourages.”

As of press time, the app’s rating had dropped from 4.6 to 3.1 stars, a decline the company described, with a firm and unhurried motion of the shoulders, as “fine.”