End of Service for the Weather Underground API

Re:End of Service for the Weather Underground API by jacobsheehy on Wednesday October 17, 2018 @09:05AM (#18238533)

IBM did not handle this well. This official announcement is months late. The API was abandoned months or years ago but they were still taking people's money for it. When they finally cut off the payment form and removed their API plans without notice in the summer there was an uproar. It hurt me deeply, making 1-2 months of dedicated work directly against this API to be useless.

Very bad decision-making and handling at IBM and I will not be supporting any of their businesses in the future. It is not reliable and they shut down without notice.

Funny timing this morning - I wrote about my experience with this API in my Show HN a few hours ago, before I knew about this news: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18235812

And another link for the lazy, the link to the WU community when we all noticed that this wreck was happening: https://apicommunity.wunderground.com/weatherapi/topics/weat...

Edit: A side anecdote. The API was so bad (in terms of service uptime) that I learned a lot about how to write retry logic for API calls on mobile. So many calls would fail for various reasons. But randomly. So for each API call you want to make, you should have 5-10 error cases to catch and then retry. Eventually you'd get a successful call!

(I switched to the free US NWS / NOAA API for All Clear Weather. It is better in performance but I miss a lot of the data available from WU, and the US-only thing is a downer too. All Clear: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.allclearwe...)

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Re:End of Service for the Weather Underground API by js2 on Wednesday October 17, 2018 @11:00AM (#18239709)

I didn't know IBM acquired WU from The Weather Channel three years ago:

https://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/weather-underg...

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Re:End of Service for the Weather Underground API by toss1 on Wednesday October 17, 2018 @10:09PM (#18245378)

I didn't either, and I was wondering why the system was rapidly degrading. It used to be my top go-to site/app, but it became so unreliable, crashing so frequently on Android I had to remove it from all devices, and rarely use it anymore on web/desktop.

I never 'looked under the hood', but it seemed to be straining & breaking the load of mountains of new cruft code. Somehow not surprised to learn that this happened on IBM's watch these days when they seem to have lost the plot in so many other ways.

For Android, FlowX [1] is a great app that is my first go-to now (no relation other than as a happy user). This Earth map [2] is a great map for web.

Anyone have other recommendations for web/desktop?

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.enzuredigi... [2] https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/isobaric/1000hPa/...

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Re:End of Service for the Weather Underground API by calibas on Wednesday October 17, 2018 @11:10AM (#18239798)

They also own WU's biggest competitor, Weather.com.

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Re:End of Service for the Weather Underground API by jaxtellerSoA on Wednesday October 17, 2018 @11:44AM (#18240156)

Even with Watson they can't get the weather right.

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Re:End of Service for the Weather Underground API by sodosopa on Wednesday October 17, 2018 @10:59PM (#18245589)

Can't wait until Watson Weather Dominator Explorer for Commerce is released. /s

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Re:End of Service for the Weather Underground API by Postremus on Wednesday October 17, 2018 @11:32AM (#18240033)

Was at a workbench type event at IBM's Germany headquarter about their Cloud infrastructure. While discussing microservices, they mentioned that they own WU. It was actively suggested we could use data from WU for our own services. This was last month(ish). -- The end of WU was not handled well by IBM.

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Re:End of Service for the Weather Underground API by renjimen on Wednesday October 17, 2018 @03:06PM (#18242588)

Similar story with the tech consultancy I work for. IBM tried to pitch the WU API to us during the summer for a large-ish project for a major client of ours. Thank god we ended up going with Dark Sky instead or that could've been quite a few man hours down the drain, not to mention us looking bad to the client.

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Re:End of Service for the Weather Underground API by chrismeller on Thursday October 18, 2018 @01:34AM (#18246139)

I know someone mentioned their app as a competitor in your other thread, but I’m not sure if anyone pointed it that they also have an API: https://darksky.net/dev

They combine multiple sources of data. Even if you don’t want to use their API, I’ve found their list of sources handy for European data (though finding what you need in Europe is still confusing as heck).

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Re:End of Service for the Weather Underground API by 6DM on Wednesday October 17, 2018 @10:53AM (#18239641)

Do you have some examples or a link to a blog for what types of error cases you ran into and how you handled it?

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Re:End of Service for the Weather Underground API by jacobsheehy on Wednesday October 17, 2018 @11:02AM (#18239724)

Unfortunately I don't have specific code examples. I was operating in stealth mode at the time and the code was closed source. I could dig some examples probably later today?

From memory, data might return normal json but with "" empty string instead of metric forecast but imperial forecast is there. Or the other way around. Or both empty. Or 0 values for variables that shouldn't be 0. Or error state json with not much info. Things like that.

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Re:End of Service for the Weather Underground API by arbitrage on Wednesday October 17, 2018 @12:09PM (#18240448)

> The API was abandoned months or years ago but they were still taking people's money for it.

So, you put months of work into a project, using an API that you knew was abandoned? And it's anybody's fault other than you own?

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Re:End of Service for the Weather Underground API by jacobsheehy on Wednesday October 17, 2018 @12:36PM (#18240764)

There was no way of knowing it was abandoned. I am taking a guess at the length of time ago it happened; my guess is informed by lack of quality of service and public-facing updates. It's reasonable to assume that the API degraded in quality over time as fewer and fewer / maybe no people were working on it.

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Re:End of Service for the Weather Underground API by bproven on Wednesday October 17, 2018 @05:55PM (#18244200)

I think it happened around May/June/July ish of this year. I remember creating a free acct using the free tier API for a coding project I did for an interview around April. Shortly after they killed the free access and I guess now it is totally dead :(

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Re:End of Service for the Weather Underground API by s73v3r_ on Wednesday October 17, 2018 @12:17PM (#18240543)

I think it's more that they abandoned the API, didn't tell anyone that they were doing that, and still took people's money.

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