July 2021: Tempest App Updates

Bug fix updates are rolling out for iOS, Android and the Web now. Changes for each platform are listed below. A big thanks to the users who sent in a bug report. If you spot anything in our most recent build let us know.

iOS - 4.20 (504)

  • Updated Rain widget so image correctly reflects the rain rate
  • Fixed an alignment issue on the today screen widget affecting some users
  • Standardized lightning reporting distances
  • Other bug fixes and performance enhancements

Android - 4.6.2 (162)

  • Fixed elevation precision issue
  • Standardized lightning reporting distances
  • Other bug fixes and performance enhancements

Web

  • Standardized lightning reporting distances
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Hi what does the standardized lightning reporting distances mean exactly? Thanks

@palmhead5 We had a bug where we were using different uncertainty ranges between the apps and the alerting system. We made updates to get all platforms using the same values.

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Ok , now I’m wondering why my acurite lightning is several strikes ahead of tempest today, since that bug fix happened, it seems to have changed my tempest to not near as sensitive as it had been. Tempest always far exceeded acurite until today?

The score right now is acurite 27 strikes tempest 6 that should never be tempest always shows way more strikes then acurite so you see why I’m concerned with whatever occurred with the bug fix

Maybe the lightning strike sensor reading is backed off to much. I am sitting here listening to the rumbles now. Watching my tempest, and it still is only listing strike 18 minutes ago. OK, I had to step away for a moment. My weather alert radio just went off. The rumbles are ongoing, and the tempest is now last strike 23 minutes ago. :frowning:

@palmhead5 and @Daybreak Thank you for your reports on the lightning strike counts. The standardized lightning changes mentioned above are independent of the strike count - they only affect the distance values presented in the apps. We’ll take a look at each of your station’s data and see if something else is going on.

All I know is my tempest was doing super until today on picking up the lightning strikes on a regular basis and now it isn’t doing so . That certainly is very suspicious all of the sudden.

it looks like the setting to show the forecast in the grid view is gone (or it is very well hidden). It still shows the forecast, which I prefer, but someone else wanted to turn it on and i could tell them where the setting was. It used to be on the same page where the show battery setting was, but it isn’t anymore.

@sunny The forecast card toggle was removed in a round of updates made in May. Our original intention was to remove the forecast card. A production Android version was released that removed the card. We listened to the feedback of our existing Android users that had the forecast card enabled and decided that the apps would continue to support users that already had the card enabled.

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I love it and I want to keep it, but why not allow new users to have it as well? They see the screenshots from other people and are wondering why they don’t have it. Is there a disadvantage of enabling it for new users?

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What @sunny said. I see the screenshots all the time or look at other stations around and see it on their grid. I purchased mine in June yet do not get the same feature set as someone a month prior to me even though I paid the same price for the device. Plus, I have a bookmark to my station grid to see current conditions but if I want to see a basic forecast I have to go to another page. Much more user friendly/usable to leave it as an option for everyone to turn on or off as they see fit.

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Along the lines of weather forecast, what is the likely-hood of getting a widget for Android to display the weather forecast. I like the WeatherFlow forecast and would like the shear ease of just having the forecast on my main screen.

@sunny and @chants92 As the Tempest app has evolved and grown to include more forecast data, a decision was made that the best display of forecast data is on our main forecast page. We left the forecast card on the Station Dashboard as a courtesy to our existing users

If you would like to see the forecast card brought back to the app, please create a feature request in the Feature Request category. That is the best way to group everyone’s feedback and gauge the interest levels of all Tempest users.

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@glenngoddard An Android forecast widget is on the roadmap. I can’t give the timing on when it will be released, but it is part of the plan for the app.

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If we direct people that want it anyway to support, would those requests be honored?

it’s kind of pointless, as many (most??) people ran out of votes. Once people have used their votes, it isn’t very likely that they are going to remove votes from one feature to use it on another feature. There are plenty of good ideas I would vote for (and even more I wouldn’t), but I can’t.

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In case you haven’t figured out the correlation yet, the number of votes is probably equal to the number of programmers working for WF. The idea of votes is to prioritize the MOST important features to each person, not build a wishlist to clutter the apps with stuff that is better handled in third-party apps…

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It only works like that if you, and all other users would redistribute their votes over all the available features. It currently gives a very skewed result. Yes you could say I give votes to the features I find the MOST important, but that is different that just counting the votes in the and and judging what is the most popular feature. Most popular is not the same as most important.
For new feature requests it will be very hard to get votes, unless you expect all users to redistribute their votes every time a new feature request is made. Fact is I don’t even remember which features I voted for (probably some or all are my own requests).
Finding in a fair, unskewed way what is the most popular feature has nothing to do with a wishlist that clutters the app. After all, the team doesn’t HAVE to work on the most popular feature. Actually I expect them to mostly follow their own roadmap and only slightly adjust it based on the feature requests.

If you want to find out what is the most important item, the system should allow us to rate each feature (5 star system, thumbs up/down etc). Then the team could work on the most popular 5 star feature.

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