Several days ago my weather details (temp; hi/lo; humidity; conditions,…) quit working. Everything has been frozen at the same reading for days now. The Location is working but I haven’t changed locs so it could be frozen and appear OK.
Has the Facer weather source changed templates so data isn’t being parsed anymore?
Not that I’m aware of, my weather is working like normal. You might want to check and make sure Facer has all the permissions it needs. (sometimes settings change with updates or on their own) Next change to a stock face from your watch for a minute and then change back to Facer. I’ve had to do that to make Facer become responsive again. Next, do you turn your watch off to charge it? I’ve had much better luck with Facer working when I restart or shut off my watches every few days. Lastly this is all from previous postings by others on how Facer’s weather works and tips to make it update, so this is just my overview of the issue.
Facer uses OpenWeather (https://openweathermap.org) for their weather source. OpenWeather does not use your “exact” location (no matter what your watch says) and just gives the region wide weather which can be different from where you are now.
You have to make sure your phone is not set to use power management (Adaptive Battery) where it closes “unused” background apps, or at least exempt the Facer app from it.
Next I’ve found that my weather updates more regularly if I open the Facer app 3 or 4 times during the day. There have been lots of times where I’ve looked at my watch and thought that the temperature was wrong, opened the Facer app, closed it and checked my watch and it be close to correct.
NOTE: I’m using a Galaxy S3 Frontier and an Active 2 watch for my daily carry. I also have a cheap TicWatch E that I use only for testing and it seems to have the same issue and cure.
These are my personal observations and are of course subjective: Your Mileage May Vary!
I do have all the permissions correctly set and am updating the weather every hour, but things are often wildly off.
After a day of research and browsing the forums I discovered (as you mentioned) that the Facer weather source is openweathermap.com and I have been comparing my watch figures against weather.com and weatherunderground.com and accuweather.com… none of which agreed with the openweathermap and my watch data.
I then found the Weather Test face that Facer created at “Facer Studios - Weather Test - watch face for Apple Watch, Samsung Gear S3, Huawei Watch, and more - Facer” and installed it getting the following data…
That largely matches the actual openweather site data except for the min/max temps for the day…
And my watch face also seems to tie in…
In this test things did match up except for the day’s hi/lo temps.
In general, however, (not sure why better for this test) things are not at all close. Wind speeds are way off, the day hi/lo temps may be as much as 10° off. The sunrise/set is usually off by 1-2 minutes, and the humidity is often off by a factor of two (compared to the other weather web sites and to my home weather station.
This is all pretty screwy and sure does not seem consistent nor accurate. Having a reasonable weather forecast was a BIG attraction for me to join the Facer premium group but this is not worth it.
Why can’t Facer associate with a better weather data source? !!! WeatherUnderground has been top-notch over the years and consistently accurate and reliable. They are now an IBM company so one can pretty safely assume they will be solid in their performance.
Perhaps (if anyone in Facer is listening) that may be worth investigating!
I’m not a Facer representative, but I’ve built a few weather apps recently. Firstly, WeatherUnderground no longer provides a public API, thus it’s not an option anymore. The next best thing WAS forecast.io - BUT they’ve been purchased by Apple and a) are no longer accepting new api user and b) will turn off their public api in June 2021. That leaves OpenWeather in the free option. I imagine Facer could use a paid provider, but someone would have to cover those costs of how many odd thousands of watches doing api pulls at least every 30 minutes, which is very expensive. The cost would have to come down to the user, and we would probably lose all the free content. I’m ok with my watch telling me more or less what the weather is.
Again, as a developer, I’ve spent a lot of time comparing apps and api’s - doing research before building my app - and I haven’t seen one that is consistently correct all of the time, and definitely not more than half accurate anything more than two days into the future. Also, you need to consider the accuracy of your phone’s GPS (because that’s how facer gets your location).
Sorry for the brain dump, I’m as irritated as you are by bad weather forecasting, but I don’t think Facer is the problem, the providers are.
as reference for wundergound: https://apicommunity.wunderground.com/weatherapi/topics/end-of-service-for-the-weather-underground-api
@kenburkhalter And to add to what @Batwolf said, not only is OpenWeather free, but they get their data from home weather stations that are able to connect to the internet. You can search their website and find where you can connect your home weather station into their network and upload your weather stats into their system. Needless to say home weather stations are not going to be as accurate as NOAA’s National Weather Service instrumentation located at most regional airports and other locations all around the country. I figure the OpenWeather/Facer weather on my watch is like the fuel gauge on my car. It gives you an indication how much fuel you have, but not an “exact” measurement.
Batwolf and SocialGuy- many thanks for your thoughful and helpful comments. Very insightful. For my computer I grab the weatherunderground stats from their weather page using regex to extract the data I want to display on my desktop screen. The open source weather stations are great (and it is interesting to learn that OpenWeather also has them) and the neat thing is there is are about 6 weather stations all within a 1.5 mile radius of my home allowing me to pick the one that is most consistent with what my own off-line simple station shows. Too bad it isn’t easy to do this with the watch.
Sounds like I have to live with it, but knowing how things works helps a lot, as I was concerned that I just wasn’t connecting or connected to a totally wrong weather source. It must be that OpenWeather is pulling data from somewhere maybe 50 miles away from me, as the data isn’t totally bad, but it often doesn’t come very close to matching my actual conditions and the fact that the sunrise/sunset times are off by 1-2 minutes seems to indicate that my location and the “weather” locations are not the same.
I think you have to remember that weather data is only periodically fetched - typically every 30 or 60 minutes, and only if there is an internet connection at that time - which means that if you are travelling, it could very well be incorrect, or your phone was not able to do the request and so you’re seeing data from two or three hours ago. It happens. A lot.
I’m completely on your side about this, and I hoped my app would make a difference, but in the end there are only so few providers we can get data from for free, otherwise we have to spam you with ads or charge you way more than you will be willing to pay for weather.
NB: Scraping data from a wunderground or the like may work well, but for a business it’s a bad move - the hosters will notice and block you when the traffic gets too high. Sad though, but I use the same technique to get info certain things…
So I understand it’s a model that uses aggregate data and algorithms to predict weather but am I the only one that’s noticed it’s VERY off lately? It doesn’t feel like this was an issue 3-4 months ago but now I find the forecast data is regularly 7-10 degrees off. I checked some other locations just to be sure and I found that on Monday, in Tucson, the OW forecast is 17 degrees higher than AccuWeather. I hear you about it just being a fuel gauge but lately the forecasts are just completely worthless.
