I’ve got a fairly high tolerance for software bugs. It comes with the territory when running beta software for most of the summer. I don’t even mind when my iPhone tells me it wasn’t on for much of the night. It happens. This Apple Watch weather bug, though, is really disappointing.
The problem is that the Apple Watch can’t reliably display Weather app data on the watch face. A few temporary fixes have been floated while we await the next watchOS update. Even when they initially work, however, the watch goes back to returning nil.
Before this bug, I was actually very excited about watchOS 10 and how it upgraded the Weather app. watchOS 10 is the first version to let you set humidity percentage as a complication on the watch face. The combination of temperature and humidity gives me the best sense of what it feels like outside.
That’s why this bug is such a bummer of an experience for the first three weeks of watchOS 10. That, and the fact that displaying temperature on my watch face is as important as showing the time and date for me. Now I’m building the habit of no longer using the watch for checking the weather.
We flagged the issue in September after it persisted from watchOS 10.0 to watchOS 10.0.1. It’s now been 22 days since watchOS 10 was officially released. watchOS 10.0.1 remains the latest software, and Apple Watch still hasn’t kicked its weather bug.
Top comment by Mike Brighton
I’ve not had any problems with weather on my Series 8. It always strikes me as strange that Apple bugs often only affect users with what must be very specific set ups. I’ve had bugs with iOS17 betas that nobody else seems to have had.
Initially, tapping a Weather app complication would launch the full app and still show the data. One factory reset later on a first-gen Apple Watch Ultra and that’s no longer the case for me.
My location permissions mirror my iPhone, but my Weather app on the watch omits current location as a city option. Instead, it’s blank complications for Cupertino and New York. So how’s the weather in New York? Not sure. The full Weather app on the watch is also returning nil half the time.
Fortunately there’s no issue for me on the iPhone with iOS 17. The hottest summer in my lifetime has also given way to more manageable weather conditions on the Gulf Coast.
And I’ll be the first to concede that there have been more pressing issues for Apple’s software. Apple squashed the iPhone heating problem, and it’s still working on shipping the main new feature on Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2. But it’s also such a head scratcher that a core Apple Watch feature is pretty borked.
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