I’m playing an outdoor show this Saturday, and I’m watching the rain forecast like a hawk. I saw on my iPhone that the day should be clear in between two rainy days. Nerve-wracking, but I’ll take it.
But later when I checked on my Apple Watch, it showed rain. Disappointed that it got so much worse within a couple hours (and not entirely trusting the tech), I went back to the iPhone to find that, conflictingly, it still showed clear weather that day.
I confirmed I was checking the same town, same day, etc, on both devices. And the “Souderton” on my watch only appears there because I first added it to my iPhone; so it should be the “same Souderton”. In fact, both show the same temperature; just different forecast.
So then I thought maybe one had old data, so I quit both apps and launched both again. But the results were the same.
Why is Apple Watch’s Weather app showing a different forecast from that of iPhone??
I have no idea why they are different, but I have seen similar differences. With weather, I always work on multiple sampling with different apps that I assume may use different modeling.
I checked with Carrot and though surrounded by rain on either side, Saturday seems good
Because the forecast changed and one of the devices hasn’t updated yet? Is your Watch a cellular model, if not, perhaps Watch hasn’t received the relayed info from iPhone yet.
In other words, some sort of lag could explain it, but there’s no way to diagnose it for certain that I know of.
That’s why I have checked multiple times, and also quit both apps and restarted them, hoping that they aren’t caching their data and will fetch fresh at that point. Also, I do see not only the current temperature but the Saturday forecasted temperatures updating on both devices, and matching each other. It’s only the % Precipitation (and daily icon) that are way off…
I don’t see a Hourly Forecast option on the Watch to compare to. On iPhone, the Hourly shows a non-zero graph. How that time-varying data is aggregated into a calculation of Precipitation Total, and how all of that translates into the little icon intended to summarize the entire day’s weather in a single square (that currently shows a cloud+sun+no rain), I’m not sure.
But whatever icon is displayed for Saturday by the weather app on Apple Watch should certainly match what iPhone shows, right?
No, my watch is just WiFi. But I’m almost always on WiFi, certainly so when I ran the tests. And my iPhone is almost always near the watch, too, in case the watch gets it weather data by syncing to the phone…
