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this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2024
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AssholeDesign
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This is a community for designs specifically crafted to make the experience worse for the user. This can be due to greed, apathy, laziness or just downright scumbaggery.
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This is actually a really great feature. Dark Sky first started using crowdsourced barometric pressure readings to provide rain warnings. It provided a 10-minute warning for rain that was incredibly accurate. Living in NY, I got a 10-minute notification because someone 10-minutes southwest of me just got rained on.
Apple bought Dark Sky a couple years ago, and integrated the feature into the Weather app. The data is anonymized (hashed, encrypted, and relayed), so now it’s completely private.
It uses more power by leaving location services and barometric readings on persistently, but you can turn it on and off when you need it. It’s great for cyclists, runners, and hikers.
Technically, wouldn't you need the guy 10 minutes in the direction of the rain cloud to have turned it on when you go on a hike? Makes the battery saving argument kinda moot I guess, you should get the notification anyway, if enough people in your area are providing sufficient data for the short term forecast.
Now in order to make that happen, people should participate if they're using the feature, but that's almost a moral argument I guess.
Anyway, would still be nice if iOS / Android had more fine grained permission controls.
That’s true. It works well when I use it. I guess it’s supplementing with the data it gets from the NWS.
I’m sure most people turn it off if they notice the location indicator in the corner is persistent, or when iOS notifies them that an app is using their location in the background for an extended period.
iOS has fine permission controls. Each API needs to be user authenticated before becoming available to any app, first or third-party. You can enable or revoke any API permission in settings under privacy.
Maybe they only turn the warnings on if you're sharing. If you have the barometer off, then they could tell you there's rain coming, but tough nuts