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Wading Through AccuWeather’s Response
- valuearb 9y agoTime for the walled garden to throw a few perps outside the walls.
- B1FF_PSUVM 9y ago>> following the standards and best practices of the industry. > No they’re not. Afraid they are, and have the spreadsheets to show it.
- mcphage 9y ago> have the spreadsheets to show it Please, do—if this is the standard practice, it should be prevented.
- cdubzzz 9y agoThis has been interesting to follow. I went through something like ten different weather apps before settling on AccuWeather because the app itself is solid (compared to the other free options). Anyone have opinions of other iOS weather apps?
- dschuler 9y agoI like Weather Underground. It does have ads, but for $2 you can get rid of them for a year I think. I remember Yahoo Weather had a good UI, but used 200MB+/month of background data even when not in use... Edit: This is a bit off-topic, but aviationweather.gov has a METAR API that works for any airport: https://aviationweather.gov/adds/dataserver https://aviationweather.gov/adds/dataserver This is a great resource if you want a specific metric from a nearby reliable source, e.g. air pressure or wind speed.
- cdubzzz 9y agoNice, thanks. I'm sure I checked out WU previously and perhaps I just didn't like the ads. Looking again it is a good interface and $2 seems fine if the alternative is free + suspect tracking. Yahoo Weather was actually my go-to originally but at some point they made an update that turned the thing in to like 80% ad/20% content. Plus their ads were always pretty invasive.
- QAPereo 9y agoJust another vote for WU, which I love.
- joezydeco 9y agoVote for WU Storm as well.
- acomjean 9y agohttp://www.weather.gov http://www.weather.gov I made a bookmarklet on my phone after searching my zip. I use the hourly weather graph which shows temp and odds of rain/snow. you have to scroll, but... For snow storms read the alerts. accuweather wanted to shut them down and had their senator introduce a bill, because ad free competition.... I saw the weather.gov page up once in the background of a TV station newscast.
- irickt 9y agoFurther tip: go to this page (for your location) and make a custom two-day chart. http://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=33&lon=-84&FcstType=graphical http://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=33&lon=-84&Fcst... Downloads from the resulting link are very fast.
- sp332 9y agoI've been using Arcus on Android, which uses the same data (from forecast.io) as the Dark Sky app on iOS. And I voluntarily installed PressureNet to report barometric pressure from my phone, because they're very clear about what data they collect and it's never been a battery drain. I believe they've been bought out by Sunshine https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sunshine-personal-accurate/id959396618?ls=1&mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sunshine-personal-accurate/i...
- nathancahill 9y agoI use Dark Sky for the nice design (easy to read the forecast up to a week at a glance), and NOAA Hi-Def Radar for drawing my own conclusions from Doppler radar.
- votepaunchy 9y agoI've never seen a 5-star app regress to a 1-star app with NOAA Hi-Def Radar in the latest update.
- brightsize 9y agoI use the http://weather.weatherbug.com http://weather.weatherbug.com app on Android. It appears that they have an iOS version as well. I'm pleased with it and the "Spark Lightning" feature is fun.
- gkya 9y agohttps://darksky.net/ https://darksky.net/ née forecast.io. I find the forecasts to be accurate for me. I've actually written an Emacs frontend to their service when it was forecast.io: http://www.gkayaalp.com/emacs.html#forecast.el http://www.gkayaalp.com/emacs.html#forecast.el. They let you make 1000 requests per day for free. On mobile I just go to their website through a bookmark.
- arprocter 9y agoI've found darksky's precipitation predictions are impressively accurate - so much so you can say 'the rain's going to stop in 5 mins' and freak out your coworkers
- MBCook 9y agoI used to love that, but a few years ago the accuracy dropped quite a bit for me. It's now 'now bad', no longer 'freakily accurate'.
- rbritton 9y agoI used to find them accurate myself. Now 90% of the time it's "Next hour forecast temporarily unavailable (radar station is down)." The radar station somehow still shows visually on the map, though.
- MBCook 9y agoDidn't DarkSky come out first, launching Fotecast.io later?
- gkya 9y agoNope, forecast.io became darksky.net, some months ago. Also, WRT your other comment, I live in Istanbul and find it very accurate, whenever I see that it shows some precipitation I take the umbrella with me, and thus I've spent the last two years way more drier.
- RealCasually 9y agoAn app called Dark Sky came out, powered by Forecast.io. Several months ago they rebranded the service to DarkSky.net which continues to power the Dark Sky app, along with other 3rd party apps like Forecast Bar.
- scott_s 9y agoI just use the default installed one. It never occurred to me to look for anything else - it tells me basically what I want to know.
- cdubzzz 9y agoI do actually like the Apple one as well, but it lacks a radar.
- macandcheese 9y agoI'll put in a vote for Fresh Air: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/fresh-air-hyperlocal-weather-noaa-radar-map/id933439687?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/fresh-air-hyperlocal-weather... Very cool visualizations of upcoming weather.
- MBCook 9y agoWeatherline has been my choice for a few years. It has a clean interface that's easy to understand and makes viewing the next few days trivial. It uses the data from DarkSky so it's pretty accurate, but doesn't use DarkSky's confusing navigation model (I left the app when they first implemented it). It's a paid app, no ads or creepiness. Only complaint? No watch app. Since Apple made the built in one worse in iOS 3 (for my use case) I've been wishing for the 7 day forecast from weatherline on my wrist. http://weatherlineapp.com http://weatherlineapp.com
- darrmit 9y agoI've had a tough time finding something good on iOS. I used WxUSA for a long time (I think that's what it was called) but then the dev stopped supporting it. Then I switched to Storm, which was awesome until they decided to stop allowing ad-free subscriptions. Then I switched to AccuWeather until this came to light yesterday. Now I'm using Carrot and MyRadar which so far seems to be great.
- jlgaddis 9y agoI like RadarScope (and pay for extra features and data feeds) but that's for live radar and not the local forecast.
- pilif 9y agoCarrot weather is my favorite. Nothing beats a weather app planning to kill you behind your back and being snarky about it. It’s not the most detailed weather app, but certainly the funniest.
- random023987 9y agoDoes anyone expect their information not to be monetized from any "free" application? (with the possible exception of an open-source application built and distributed by an open-source advocate, e.g. Firefox, K-9 mail, sipdroid, DDG, etc.)
- sp332 9y agoThis is explicitly against the App Store terms of service, so yes it's unexpected.
- jacquesm 9y agoIf you really start taking the App Store terms of service and apply them to the letter to the Apps in the store quite a few very popular apps would vanish.
- MBCook 9y agoAnd I wish hey would, for these kind of reasons. So many popular apps flagrantly violate the rules but get to stay because their popular (Uber, Facebook, etc). Lots of minor ones are seemingly ignored. They break rules too but Apple doesn't seem to care.
- stordoff 9y agoIsn't that what should happen though? I also doubt they'd vanish - iOS is too big of an audience to ignore, so unless the Terms are particularly onerous, I'd imagine most would just fall in line.
- compiler-guy 9y agoYes. When I opt-out of sharing location information, I expect the app not to monetize my location. That's what opting out should mean.
- jpttsn 9y agoI agree with the sentiment, but what we turn off is iOS "Location Services." It's not really possible to "opt out of sharing location information." It's like, if I opt out of showing someone ID, I don't expect that to protect me if they guess my age some other way. So I'm not surprised at being triangulated. The incentives (mis)align that way.
- dzdt 9y agoThis article is based on the iphone app. Does anyone know the situation with the android version?
- MBCook 9y agoIt wouldn't surprise me if it was doing something similar. Why be a shitty privacy invading company on only one platform?
- lbhnact 9y agoweather.gov/5digitzip will take you straight to what you want and is just about as easy as an app for most folks. Using well-designed government services feels like a good habit these days. Try it on your desktop or mobile browser, easy as pie: http://weather.gov/10018 http://weather.gov/10018
- saalweachter 9y agoChecking the same zip code with weather.gov and weather.com yielded 122KB / 1.6s (weather.gov) and 1.1MB / 18s (weather.com).
- ivm 9y agoSo we entered the era where government sites are lightweight and responsive while commercial sites are bloated and slow.
- whipoodle 9y agoIn my experience government sites aren't usually slow or bloated, they just look shitty.
- ivm 9y agoI wouldn't call "shitty" something with a nice layout and readability. "Not trendy" – yes.
- mulmen 9y agoI wouldn't call the stereotypical government site a "nice layout". It seems like more often than not my experience with government sites is that I have no idea how to find the data I need. Try finding a campground in Washington in the early spring. Is it open? Do they take reservations? Are they required? Good luck. Agreed that trendy and usable are unrelated.
- 9y ago
- code4tee 9y agoWeather.gov is the source for most forecasts out there anyway (your TV weather guy is often just regurgitating what NOAA is saying) so I prefer to just get the info from the source and devoid of all the click bait crap that has infested most commercial weather sites.
- jlgaddis 9y agoI completely agree. I used to have a couple of pages (across various weather sites) bookmarked but nowadays I just have the "local" page on forecast.weather.gov bookmarked. No ads, no links to clickbait articles, no unrelated crap I don't care about, and it loads a helluva lot quicker and transfers much less data also.
- rbritton 9y agoFor a quick shortcut, you can do weather.gov/<zip code> for any US location.
- rconti 9y agoI love wunderground because of the personal weather station support for hyper-local weather. Though at some point it's kind of a "man with one clock knows precisely what time it is, a man with two clocks is never quite sure" kind of thing.
- jmspring 9y agoAnd sadly, NOAA doesn't update their predictions even when something like rain is occurring right outside one of their offices (happened in the Monterey Bay Area).
- brudgers 9y agoI'm a big fan of NOAA's Hourly Weather Graph. It tells me how much weather will happen when.
- tareqak 9y agoCanada has had Environment Canada's weather reporting for a while: February 8, 2010: https://web.archive.org/web/20100208180217/http://www.weatheroffice.gc.ca:80/city/pages/on-143_metric_e.html https://web.archive.org/web/20100208180217/http://www.weathe... Today: http://weather.gc.ca/city/pages/on-143_metric_e.html http://weather.gc.ca/city/pages/on-143_metric_e.html As a fun extra, I just found an Apps Gallery that uses open data: http://open.canada.ca/en/apps?_ga=2.119480777.1582349726.1503424264-1037109847.1501179108 http://open.canada.ca/en/apps?_ga=2.119480777.1582349726.150...
- schemathings 9y agoPrivacy Badger only reported one tracking cookie (google analytics) on OP's site. ;)
- synicalx 9y agoIs that unexpected?
- schemathings 9y agoJust seemed ironic in context. HN doesn't, for example.
- tonetheman 9y agoreminds me of when apple did that same exact thing https://www.wired.com/2011/04/apple-iphone-tracking/ https://www.wired.com/2011/04/apple-iphone-tracking/
- pvg 9y agoThat's not even close to being 'that exact same thing'.
- feelin_googley 9y agoQuestion: Hypothetically, if Apple were collecting similiar data that would allow reasonably accurate geolocation of any iOS-running device (without explicit user consent), would this blogger be similarly upset? In other words, does his protest extend to all unconsented collection of data that can be used to geolocate, or only to collection by certain parties of which he does not approve? To clarify the term "unconsented", I mean outgoing connections to the third party's servers that are not intentionally initiated by the user. For example, periodic automatic outgoing connections would be "unconsented" unless the user has to do something to initiate them and is aware she is initiating constant network traffic that will continue indefinitely. (The traffic might plausibly be used for geolocation.)
- 9935c101ab17a66 9y agoWhat's your point? Your comment comes across as a series of leading questions structured to insinuate Apple does the same thing AccuWeather does, which would then make the author a hypocrite? Even if Apple does do what you've described (I'd be interested if you have examples, because the example you provided isn't an example at all, and rather is just vague speculation), that doesn't make this critique of Accuweather any less valid. And I don't think Apple does.
- blktiger 9y agoYes
- brudgers 9y agoTo me, this raises the question of why should this class of behavior pass the app store review process?
- willstrafach 9y agoI have been trying to speak with Apple about this. Hopefully some changes will be made.
- mcphage 9y agoYeah—why should apps even be able to see the list of available Wifi networks? Or at the very least, it should require permissions, or maybe they could only see networks from a pre-specified list?
- efreak 9y agoAt least on Android, I think it does require permissions. The difference is that users have no idea what it is and therefore don't care. It's unfortunate that the list of on-demand permissions doesn't include doesn't include things like local network info (or internet access in general). I personally give strong NO to any app that requests GPS location and isn't an actual map app, but Google no longer requests confirmation (or even tells you) when apps add new permissions in the same category, so every so often I have to go through my list of installed apps.
- AceyMan 9y agoI'm a weather app junkie owing to my previous career in airline operations. I've tried (and bought) at least 95% of the decent weather app on Android. Some oldies, but goodies, like Weather Services Pro & Eye in Sky. Currently running Weather Timeline and am fairly happy. (Must have dewpoint data, or no deal!) But all that flapping was driven by my ditching AccuWeather (Premium) when they re-did the UX in 2013, trading in simple line-art style icons (with theme choices, also) to freaking photos of the sky conditions. Completely obtuse and difficult to interpret at a glance. I have a scathing review posted (same nick handle) which I 'touch' every so often to be sure it isn't listed as a review "for a previous version of the application". So I've been on the "Screw AccuWeather" train for lo these four-odd years now. Welcome aboard, mateys. :-P