Widgets on Android stopped working after the last update
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@sethro2 Can you specify the location, which causes this?
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@Ondřej-Šutera I am in Beavercreek, Ohio, United States.
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Before yesterdays (ish) update the widget would render and I could manually update.
Today it simply states I need to turn on notifications.Is there a way to use this widget without notifications? Pulling down the notification menu in the system and having it clogged with "updating location/weather" is awful. It's a waste of space when I'm trying to see actual legitimate notifications.
Other apps do not have this requirement and these feels like a big backslide in usability and UX.
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@William-Skidmore Hi. Unfortunatelly our current widgets require allowing notifications. The widget is syncing your current location and pulls forecast data which also needs to be rendered. The notification is needed to keep these CPU difficult processes alive.
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@TeaKave sorry and without any offense, but then your engineers may need some consulting.
Without knowing details I can te you, that the weather forecast and weather radar widgets of the German weather services app update every 15 minutes including location and they do not show any notification so it seems to be possible. -
@thomasn-1 I already described the situation few times in my previous posts and as I mentioned we will consider more frequent updates, hovewer there are other issues which needs to be adressed too.
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@MarkNagy hi my post was about the need for notifications which I dont see with other apps.
Windy is the only app that needs notifications for its widgets to work on my phone. -
@thomasn-1 as I described earlier currently the app requires notifications to perform these operations. Maybe in the future this will change hovewer currently it is what it is. Thank you for your understanding.
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@MarkNagy Just installed 39.1.5, all permissions were given but the widget is still not refreshing (not even triggering by hand).
Sample of widget when I added it:
It shows current temperature as 26C, and after one hour or so without change, I've tried refreshing it by hand to no avail.
Then I switched the location to a favourite and returned it to the GPS location and it refreshed as below (22C).
I'm on a Samsung S10 Lite with Android 12.
Any suggestions of what I could try?
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@marcorotta Thanks for the report and the screenshots. This may be a data caching issue. We will take a look at this.
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Came here to point the same out. I have Samsung Galaxy z fold and my widgets are just black boxes. I tried everything re settings and configurations.
I'm only here for one widget, so if this doesn't get a fix then Im out🤷♂️
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I'm here to confirm your most recent update didn't change anything on my end. The widget still behaves the same: it can update successfully only when the location has changed, otherwise there are no weather updates.
I've noticed your discussion about requirement for enabling notifications and I have to assume that either your key team members may have changed, or they've completely rewritten it with another (more abstract) programming language by moving away from the native way of doing it in order to "save time" - hence these issues became a big nightmare for so long.
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@madjoe Hi. We have rewritten almost the whole codebase. Currently we are rewriting the whole update mechanism but I am not able to tell when it will be released. We are planning to test the widgets in every possible condition on every device we have to ensure compatibility, so it will be a longer process.
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@TeaKave Thanks for clarifying. Could you tell me was the previous code base written in Kotlin/React Native and the current one in Flutter/Ionic/ReactJS perhaps? If so, that would answer the previous debate reg. using notifications as an unnecessary requirement. Thanks.
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@madjoe The answer is more complex and unfortunately we are not allowed to share implementation details. We are using some native functions to access location more reliably. The new version may require notifications only when current location is selected for widgets.
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@Evan-Auld @madjoe Did you try to handle the process here in the version 39.1.5? Please let us know.
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@Ondřej-Šutera I confirm all those steps were followed and my current version is the most recent one: 39.1.5. Widget is still useless when the current location is selected until you move elsewhere (then it fetches data one-time-only for the new location normally). What actually doesn't work is the frequent updates for the same location.
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@madjoe said in Widgets on Android stopped working after the last update:
@Ondřej-Šutera I confirm all those steps were followed and my current version is the most recent one: 39.1.5. Widget is still useless when the current location is selected until you move elsewhere (then it fetches data one-time-only for the new location normally). What actually doesn't work is the frequent updates for the same location.
Fully echo that. I've done all steps and have the same scenario.
Thanks. -
@madjoe @marcorotta Thank you for both feedbacks. We still work on fixing all possible issues and this topic has completely main priority now. I will keep you posted. Thank you for your patience.
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@Ondřej-Šutera After some recent updates the behavior improved, indeed sometimes there is a notification showing up and the widget updates.
The main problem still remains for me that it does not update reliably. Sometimes it stops updating and I keep seeing the old forecast/temperature without knowing it, which is very bad. I would prefer to not rely on automatic updating at all if I could manually update each time, but the manual update doesn't work!
I think the biggest problem is that the manual update doesn't work. I can accept that the automatic updates can be buggy and not work on various platforms because of battery optimization, blocking of notifications etc. But why is it so difficult to make the manual update reliably work?
