Yahoo has recently announced it will stop providing its weather data as a free service. This will eventually result in weather in DIN Time for Pebbles to stop displaying.

Since the Pebble platform, in my view, has no future and other weather providers are either costly or doesn’t provide the necessary data this can be seen as the final nail in the coffin for DIN Time for Pebbles.

Enjoy the weather while it lasts. You can still continue to use DIN Time without weather data in the future by disabling weather it in the settings.

Yahoo has made a major change to how their weather API works, so DIN Time (and probably many other watch faces and apps) can’t update the weather data. I’m looking into what can be made to get it up and running again.

Once again there are problems on Yahoo’s end (their geolocation service) when getting weather data if you use the GPS to select the weather location in DIN Time. The solution for now is to visit woeid.rosselliot.co.nz and find a woied for your location. Enter it in the weather settings popup (don’t tap the Get button!), save and you should start seeing updated weather again.

So, what about adding other weather providers?

It’s on my todo list, but it won’t happen now. Sorry.

There are currently ongoing problems with the weather data provided by Yahoo for the DIN Time watch face for Pebble Smartwatches.

This is not an error in DIN Time. For most users and locations the data sent by Yahoo often is several days old, sometimes up to 15 days! Only about 1 in 5 weather update requests contain the latest weather data and will be displayed in DIN Time. I have done some changes in version 2.33, released on November 23, to handle the issue better. Once DIN Time has gotten an up-to-date weather report it will save it for up to six hours, or until a newer one is available. If DIN Time hasn’t been able to download any new data for six hours “OLD DA/TA”, along with question marks instead of weather icons, will be displayed. Weather checks will continue to be done and eventually new data will hopefully be available.

I do not have any information about when Yahoo might resolve this issue, if ever. They seem to be aware of it however. I encourage you to visit this page and vote for the issue, which may speed up the process.

Why Yahoo?

Yahoo has unfortunately been the only practical free option for weather data with the amount of users DIN Time has. It is also quite accurate for most locations. Other weather providers would be very costly, or does not provide the kind of data or location service needed for DIN Time. I previously used Openweathermap.org and I got a lot of complaints about its accuracy. They have very good data for some location, but really poor for some.

What about Weather Underground, forecast.io, yr.no…?

Some weather providers let’s users register for free API keys, which theoretically could be entered by the user in weather applications like DIN Time. While this is useful and definitely something I consider I must also provide a weather service that works “out of the box” without forcing the users to register at another site.

Yr.no has been a popular suggestion lately. Unfortunately they don’t support geolocation through their API, which means it’s not possible for the Pebble app to send the user’s location in coordinates and get the weather for that location in return. You need to submit a valid location name and this isn’t practical.

I sincerely hope this issue will be resolved soon. If not, I will of course consider other options.