Longer forecast description in WeatherKit?

Question

Created Mar ’23

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I’m migrating from Dark Sky to WeatherKit and I’m disappointed to discover that there isn’t a longer forecast description like DarkSky’s ‘summary’. Instead all I can get is the one or two words from ‘condition’.

Example for the hourly forecast in my area tonight:

Dark Sky: “Light rain until morning, starting again in the evening”.
WeatherKit: “Rain”

Does anyone know if there’s any plan to add a longer description? My app partly relies on these details and I’m worried about how to work around this limitation. Do I get the description from another source? What if there’s a discrepancy between weather data? Do I scrap WeatherKit entirely? My app is free with no ads so I really try to stay low on api calls and there just doesn’t seem to be any better options in that regard compared to WeatherKit. (I average 6-8k calls a day in darksky)

any help/advice/ideas would be greatly appreciated.

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Answer 1

OP

Apple

Mar ’23

Accepted Answer

The conditionCode field in the daily, hourly, and current weather responses is an enumeration value indicating the predominant condition for that period. It is not really intended or usable as a summary string to be shown to users. For example, multi-word conditions like "Partly Cloudy" are camelCased instead of broken with a space and the values are not localized.

However, WeatherKit does provide all the information that would be needed to summarize the weather in a way that is appropriate for your own app and domain. The right information to include in a summary will necessarily be different for different kinds of apps. A sailing app may highlight prevailing winds in the afternoon, while a fitness app may call out temperature, humidity, and UV index for outdoor workouts. WeatherKit gives developers the freedom to summarize the weather conditions in the best way for their users rather than locking them into a one-size-fits-all general purpose summary.

0

Answer 2

Skyla157 OP

Mar ’23

OK, that’s a No then?

So … you replace the competition with your own product, remove one of the (IMHO) better features, and then tell your developers it’s to their benefit.

I, and my users, appreciated the General Purpose Summary. Sure, I can spend some time (at my skill level, a lot) to creating a function that will take the forecast and somehow cobble together a general summary. But it’s insulting to tell me it’s a “freedom”, especially when it was once so conveniently offered.

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