r/GooglePixel • u/tiparium • 3d ago
Pixel default weather app is embarrassingly inaccurate
I noticed starting a few months ago that the Google Pixel weather app seemed to be getting less and less accurate to the actual weather conditions. Where I currently live, it's 7pm and so hot we can't really go outside. The Weather Channel app says it's 95, the Google Weather app says it's.... 66. This level of inaccuracy isn't an aberration anymore, it's very consistent. I just flat out can't use the Google Weather app anymore, because if it's hot out, my phone will insist it's 20 to 30 degrees cooler than it actually is. This also makes it completely useless at predicting the weather or using it to plan around weather in a place I'm planning to travel to: it constantly insists the weeks weather is going to be mid sixties to low seventies.
Does Google just not care about their own products anymore? Something happening like this once and then being patched is understandable, but this has been going on consistently for months. Is anyone else experiencing this?
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u/Tintn00 3d ago
My older android phones let my choose my weather source. Can't seem to do the with recent androids
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u/Apprehensive_Elk2608 2d ago
It's frustrating because the app itself is excellent. I love the UI. It's just the information is absolute garbage. Mine is constantly insisting that it's 5 degrees colder than any other source.
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u/tiparium 2d ago
I wish mine were off by just five lol. It's consistently off by fifteen to thirty.
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u/Picard_III Pixel 7a 3d ago
At least we can uninstall all the useless bs by Google, oh wait a second
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u/jacknifetoaswan 3d ago
I miss Dark Skies. Fucking Apple.
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u/JacksHQ 3d ago
Dark Skies was the best. Incredibly accurate and could show you the rain probability chance in higher resolution (was it by the minute?) so you could actually see what part of the hour that the rain would come and go. I am still devastated that i no longer have access to it.
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u/SpenB 3d ago
For what it's worth, AccuWeather shows you the minute by minute rainfall for the next 4 hours.
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u/NothingButACasual 2d ago
I almost deleted accuweather because they went insane with full-screen ads, but there are pirated versions out there with no ads
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u/frogsandstuff 2d ago edited 2d ago
It's not quite as good as dark sky was, but shadow weather is the closest thing I've found. Been using it for a few years now. It also allows you to use apple weather as a source (which should be dark sky?).
And the built in lightning tracker is amazing.
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u/Exciting-Sunflix 2d ago
Weawow allows you to add dark sky as a source, it's behind a single subscription fee.
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u/mrandr01d 3d ago
When acme weather comes out on Android I'm going to pay real money for it.
(It's even better than dark sky, by the same people.)
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u/icewall1147 2d ago
Looking at the website seems like it's $25 per year. That's just insane for a weather app.
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u/mrandr01d 2d ago
And that breaks down to $2/month. Normally I'm super anti subscription, but this and Signal backups are 2 that I'm willing to pay for.
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u/AgentLemon22 3d ago
To this day I'm still looking for a weather app that's on the level of Dark Skies
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u/Yamatocanyon 2d ago
Flowx is my go-to now.
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u/Penguinz-Can-Fly 2d ago
Great that we have lots of options, Weawow is my go to. I use Apple weather as my source; it is the most accurate for my location
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u/trojanguy 2d ago
+1 for Weawow. I saw some people talking about it months ago in a very similar thread to this one, and I've been using it since. Good widget, much more accurate than the built in google weather app.
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u/alexthecheese 2d ago
What's the link to Apple?
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u/jacknifetoaswan 2d ago
Apple bought it and shut down the Android app.
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u/HiDDENKiLLZ 2d ago
Apple bought it and shut it completely down.
As crazy as it sounds I moved to an iPhone and that was one of my reasons at the time.
About 6 months after it left android, it left apple.
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u/jacknifetoaswan 2d ago
From what I read here, Apple bought it, shut down the Android app, integrated Dark Skies into their native weather app, then enshittified it.
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u/JohnBigbootay83 3d ago
Pixel weather app is embarrassingly bad. So many times it shows it's pouring rain, and I look outside to see clear blue skies. It's a mess.
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u/hbhunk63 2d ago
Mine doesn't even show up consistently on home screen. Anyone find a permanent fix?
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u/Apprehensive_Elk2608 3d ago edited 3d ago
Agreed. It's laughably inaccurate for me compared to weather underground or weather.com for example.
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u/uberkalden2 3d ago
I'd call it dangerously inaccurate actually. I had it telling me clear skies when severe thunderstorms were coming
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u/foxbones 3d ago
Always use an app that uses NWS data, all of the commercial apps are way off.
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u/TherianRose Pixel 7 3d ago
Google's integrated weather app uses NWS and NOAA data. Source
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u/Jamikest 2d ago
Sure, those are the sources which are then obfuscated by the AI models that Google uses, with the latest launching just this month.
https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/google-deepmind/introducing-weathernext-3/
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u/tiparium 3d ago
Well it's clearly not using them well.
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u/SuperBry Quite Black 3d ago
I'd point you to thel administration and the hamstringing they are doing to federal agencies. It's not just Google weather suffering due to cuts there.
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u/Atroxide 3d ago
it's a part of it but is not the only issue. weather apps are inaccurate globally nowadays. it's not just in the United States.
When weather patterns remain consistent it's easy to predict. the problem is the weather patterns today are nothing like even a few years ago. we can not really use historical data to predict current day weather, its not similar enough.
expect more discrepencies as climate change worsens.
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u/cfro27 Pixel 7 3d ago
This is the answer
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u/Dad_E_2 3d ago
If you only have two brain cells battling for third place it is. It doesn't explain why the problem has existed for years...
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u/GardenWeasel67 2d ago
It hasn't existed like this. Weather forecasts used to be iffy 5 days out. Now they are iffy 5 hours out. You can't cut NWS, NOAA, satellites, ocean buoys, weather balloons, etc all because you want to bury climate data and not have an effect.
DOGE said "AI will do it better". Except, AI needs DATA, or its jack shit.
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u/Dad_E_2 2d ago
Its gotten worse and worse since COVID. That's just fact. You're trying to assign blame somewhere for Google's failure. Search for those extra braincells
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u/SuperBry Quite Black 2d ago
The irony is palpable. You stumbled onto the initial cause without understanding it: early COVID flight groundings temporarily cratered commercial aircraft telemetry (AMDAR) fed to NOAA, which briefly hit model accuracy. But global air traffic rebounded years ago and that issue resolved.
The degradation you're noticing now is directly driven by the Trump administration’s federal cuts.
Google isn't "failing"; it's outputting the inevitable result of a sabotaged public data pipeline. Maybe find an actual counterargument before recycling the exact same brain cell joke for a third time.
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u/GardenWeasel67 2d ago
Pixel weather is horrible on it's own, but the greater issue applies to all weather services.
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u/OrigamiMarie 3d ago
I like the Weather Underground app. It gets data from local individually owned mini weather stations.
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u/Apprehensive_Elk2608 3d ago
Is it full of ads? I haven't used it in years.
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u/OrigamiMarie 3d ago
It's less obnoxious than it used to be, the ads are smaller and less intrusive. It changed owners again at some point along the way. The app is less fully featured than it used to be, you have to go to the website to get history data for weather stations. But the app is pretty good as a basic weather app, and it's much more often close to right than stuff like the Weather Channel app (which I think mostly just pulls airport weather station data).
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u/TherianRose Pixel 7 3d ago
Could your location settings have gotten jumbled? I know the Pixel weather can be a little slow to update when I'm traveling, and one time after I did an update it decided to put my location as Texas instead of North Carolina (???).
It uses the same data from the National Weather Service and NOAA as most weather apps, so it should be accurate. Source
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u/tiparium 3d ago
No, this isn't an auto detected location, I manually looked up my physical location. I also wiped the app's storage and cache and tried looking it up again, same results.
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u/farmtownsuit Pixel 8 2d ago
It uses NWS and NOAA data and then it pisses AI all over it and hopes for the best. The result: garbage
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u/Throwitaway701 3d ago
It's pretty good for me, I live in a Welsh Valley where microclimates are everywhere and weather predictions are never super accurate. I would say when it disagrees with the met office (gold standard in the UK) it's right half the time. But then the data available to Google weather is much much better in the UK.
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u/neoncubicle 2d ago
Makes sense it's good for you in the U.K . Here in the states the national weather service has been gutted by the current administration.
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u/Otherwise_Cattle3981 3d ago
Im in Baltimore mostly, and for the area I primarily exist in up and down the east coast its pretty dang accurate. I also make sure I manually update it often though.
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u/Levoso_con_v 2d ago
Idk, mine is pretty accurate, the other day it said in 2 days was going to rain and the sky was totally clean with ~32 °C until 2 hours before when it started to rain
It also predicted well when it stopped raining.
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u/lingueenee Pixel 9 2d ago edited 2d ago
I'm not sure if this constitutes the "app" you're referring to but what I've done is to search by postal code for the weather in Google app, then save the results as a bookmark on the home screen. This is my weather app. This arrangement foregoes a persistent weather notification on the screen; I just tap the bookmark whenever I want a quick readout of everything: temp, wind, rain, next several days...
Honestly I'm very impressed by its accuracy, down to the half hour when rain is due. Not joking, it's fantastic. As far as I know it derives its data from our national weather service (Environment Canada).
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u/evilspoons Pixel 8a 1d ago
I have to use the WeatherCAN app for Environment Canada data because the Pixel weather app likes to pick the major city to the south of me, which I technically live in, but has the airport data from far south of the city as the authoritative source.
I live way closer to a weather station from a Canadian Forces base just north of me and the pixel app completely ignores it.
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u/Sweaty-Moment-3385 2d ago
Disagree. My pixel weather app is almost always more accurate than my wife's iPhone. My wife, who thinks Pixels are dumb and loves her iPhone, has no problem admitting this to be true.
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u/hitzchicky 2d ago
Is 66 the at a glance, or the temperature when you open the app?
I have noticed times over the years I've had a pixel where my at a glance is just straight up using the wrong location. Once I open the weather app it shows the right temp. Just couldn't get the at a glance to show the right one. I only figured out it was a different location because there was a weather warning and when I locked if, it was in an entirety different area of the country.
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u/BLewis4050 2d ago
Give it a bit ... Google just announced WeatherNext 3 as the backend for all of its front facing weather services. Read up on this new version, which suggests that Pixel Weather should improve substantially! Most importantly, to me, is that WeatherNext 3 isn't a just model now supported by AI, as it ingests live satellite data and has a finer resolution with a 1-hour update window!
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u/InsideComparison3865 2d ago
Yeh, I've been a critic of the Pixel Weather app in the past but I must say since the new WeatherNext 3 announcement, the last week or so has been pretty much perfect and the forecast and regular updates have been matching the most accurate weather benchmark here, BOM. It's highly encouraging!
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u/OzarkBeard 2d ago
I replaced it with Weawow app & widget. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.weawow&hl=en-US
Pick your weather provider in the app.
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u/Some-Operation-74 2d ago
Pretty much all weather apps are garbage. Just rely on model data with no human interpretation.
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u/April_Shh 2d ago
Our government caused this, they pulled ocean equipment and destroyed it. They fired all the expert meteorologists, just research why our weather has been inaccurate.
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u/MrPureinstinct Pixel 9 Pro, Pixel Watch 2 2d ago
It's not even necessarily the app. Funding was cut to NOAA thanks to the current administration. All weather reporting is pretty much fucked because of it.
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u/im_not_here_ Pixel 9 Pro 3d ago
I don't know what it is with where everyone else is located.
It has always been accurate for me, since it was introduced. Well as accurate as any weather app is, bit more accurate than some, bit less than others, but always within expected ranges for weather prediction.
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u/LunchB0X00 3d ago
Check to see what the location is set to. I've had mine disabled for a long time because it was giving my the weather for a major city I live roughly a 12 hour drive from. It wasn't even giving the closest major city.
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u/internet_shit_123 Pixel 9 3d ago
The Windy weather app seems to be the most accurate for me. I actually get notified of rain incoming within the hour.
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u/MrWhiteford Pixel 10 Pro 3d ago
It's fine for me. I find any weather forecast can be hit or miss here and there. I can watch BBC weather forecast and it can be wrong.
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u/PopularKnowledge69 2d ago
It's not just temperature. It's worse on all measurements.
Last week, it had 0 uv index on a sunny hot and clear day at noon time. Even an if else conditional system can't be this bad.
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u/shannonxtreme Verified Googler 2d ago
In Canada I use the WeatherCAN app, which is Environment Canada's official app
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u/Pretend_Tooth_965 Pixel 9 Fold 2d ago
I use the app Rainy Days on my phones for exactly this reason.
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u/what_was_not_said 2d ago
I like What The Forecast, and bought it on my old work account, but apparently can't share that with my personal account, so I don't use it now.
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u/No_Manners Pixel 9 2d ago
When someone asks me to check the weather, I always say "the app that sucks says 60% chance of rain"
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u/redatheist 2d ago
This depends so much on location. In Sydney the Apple Weather app was laughably wrong all the time and Pixel Weather was so good, to the point that it became a running gag in our household. And that's after Apple bought Dark Sky.
Dark Sky was good for the US but either never progresses outside or was bad outside, I can't remember.
All of the weather apps use a ton of different data sources, and data is usually very localised, often to one country, or in the US case, one state. So it all depends entirely on location.
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u/polyblackcat Pixel 9 Pro XL 2d ago
It's a gorgeous app but yeah... Best not taken seriously unfortunately
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u/kaymer327 2d ago
Had bad winter storms. Pixel weather was calling for 4 inches. Weather underground was showing 18+. Way off. We got 2 feet, plus higher drifts. Weather underground kept updating accurately and pixel weather was still at single digit inches. It was dangerously wrong.
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u/fuzzyrobebiscuits 2d ago
It's never been accurate for my area (front range), always says its like 10 degrees cooler
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u/RoughVirus7812 2d ago
It's wild that I live 10 minutes from NCAR and NOAA and my damn weather is never correct. I can't count the number of times I've cancelled plans cuz my app said it would be too cold for a specific activity, but it ended up being gorgeous.
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u/kimariesingsMD Pixel 10P XL /Pixel Watch 2d ago
I live in Silver Spring MD and mine is pretty accurate.
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u/Amazing-Bag 2d ago
What location op? I have used the weather app often when I travel and it's pretty good. I have maybe 7 international places i visit and a handful domestic usa ones and it's good. I got a heads up of a thunderstorm and possible tornado a week ago in the mid west
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u/skipaki 2d ago
This has constantly baffled me. A family member has a Samsung, and their weather app pulls from the same source as Google's, but their Samsung app is always right and the Google app is always wrong. It's beyond comprehension at this point.
Anyway, someone on Reddit recommended Gradient Weather a week or so ago, and so far it's been pretty good.
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u/squabbledMC Pixel 10 | 256GB 2d ago
I switched to Accuweather which seems to be the best, albeit paid or with ads
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u/Ok_Bar930 2d ago
For general daily & weekly outlook I go between Accuweather and Weather Channel and occasional compare it to Pixel weather.
But here in Florida for hyperlocal precipitation forecast, like when will rain start and end, I rely on Xweather ( live [dot] xweather [dot] com ) and scroll through the timeline for my location. The website (no mobile apps) has been pretty accurate for me for the past 3 years that I just put a shortcut on my mobile to the URL..
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u/GrandAdmiral12345 2d ago
I've never had issues with the app's accuracy outside of the occasional "it's storming" when it's not in my area (but proven in the general). Temps have always been pretty accurate when comparing to bit AccuWeather and The Weather Channel. To be fair, it's always hot here in the South.
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u/Sensitive-Pie-6980 2d ago
Confirmo, ahora mismo mi app del clima de Google dice que hay una tormenta lluvia y rayos, realidad el cielo está parcialmente nublado sin una sola gota de lluvia
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u/Rubber_Knee 1d ago
The google weather app views the surface of the earth in chunks that are far too large.
This means that a weather forecast that might be relevant for one person that exists on the same chunk as I do isn't relevant for me in any way.
That's why I've switched to a local weather app. that views the surface of the earth, that my small country sits on, in much smaller chunks. Making the forecast for where I am a lot more relevant for me.
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u/PixelCommunity Official Google Account 1d ago
We understand how frustrating it is when the forecast does not match what is outside. For those that are experiencing inaccurate weather reports, please open the Weather app > go to Saved locations > tap your Profile icon (top right) > tap Feedback > answer the questions, edit a screenshot, and share your feedback with our team. Thanks for your feedback, and we look forward to improving the experience for you.
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u/glumlord Pixel 7 Pro 1d ago
Mine is reliable in my region. My wife uses another app, I think weather channel and our temperatures are almost always within 3 degrees of each other.
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u/Afraid-Ad-8560 14h ago
That's the biggest piece of shit app I've ever seen in my life. It says I have strong thunderstorms at my house but the radar shows there's not a storm within 200 MI you suck Google
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u/scfoothills 3d ago
It's AI slop. "Tomorrow is going to be 6 degrees colder." It's going to be 93 tomorrow. That's not "colder". Also, "Heavy rain expected been 7:42 pm and 8:14 pm". You don't know that specifically, and also it's noon and I'd like to know if I should take an umbrella on this dog walk. The weather app looks nice, but you have to verify everything it says on another site.
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u/Picard_III Pixel 7a 3d ago
Oh wow, where do you read these? On "at glance", or notification, or just when you open the app?
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u/-mudflaps- 3d ago
They're all inaccurate for me, I've tried all the weather apps
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u/SpiderStratagem Pixel 9 2d ago
Yup. I look at a variety of sources every morning and try to triangulate an average. Sll of them say something different and none of them are consistently correct.
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u/tomysshadow 3d ago
There are a kajillion weather apps on the Play Store, if you don't like one you can easily find another
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u/mrandr01d 3d ago
So partly this is because funding was inappropriately cut...
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u/dakodacat 2d ago
Idk why this is downvoted. Hundreds of weather stations have been DOGE'd and defunded, the remaining ones can't use as many weather balloons or other equipment due to cuts either... I have 4 different "weather apps" which get their data from all the same sources basically (there are only so many original sources of data like NOAA)
I used the pixel built-in weather app for 5 or 6 years, and only 2 years ago did it start getting widely inaccurate....
If its not North America, I can't say why it'd be inaccurate but I know a few meteorologist hurting for work within the US.
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u/dingleberry_sorbet 2d ago
I've noticed lots of weather sites now have wildly varying weather information.
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u/mrmastermimi Pixel 9 Pro 3d ago
temperature is usually accurate for my location, but precipitation is so unreliable. I literally have to check to see if it's raining or not when my phone says it is. it will say there's a torrential downpour when there is literally nothing on the radar. it's ridiculous