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Jerusalem – Yahoo Weather iPhone App FAIL

13 years ago
16 Comments
by ck
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Jerusalem has been eliminated

UPDATE (originally published June 11): My friend at Yahoo that we alerted to this issue sent back a note that he got from his people “The issue for the iPhone Weather app has been fully resolved. The fix was pushed to all production servers and verified…. This resolves both the issue with the default weather location Jerusalem as well as searches for “Jerusalem”, “East Jerusalem” and “West Jerusalem”. One note: Users who have already added the locations “West Jerusalem” or “East Jerusalem” on the Weather app will continue to see these names on the client until they remove these locations and add Jerusalem again.” [RY]

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A few days ago I noticed that the weather for Jerusalem on my iPhone’s ubiquitous weather app stopped updating. Assuming it was some kind of network glitch, I didn’t pay it much attention, especially since I uh… live in Jerusalem and know what the weather is. This time of year? HOT, with mercifully cool evenings.

Well, it turns out that Yahoo, who runs the app with information gathered by Weather.com, suddenly changed its reporting. Now if you want the weather for Jerusalem, you have two choices – East Jerusalem and West Jerusalem. On the Yahoo weather page East Jerusalem’s weather is in Palestinian Occupied Territories >West Bank >Jerusalem and West Jerusalem’s weather is in Weather >Israel >Yerushalayim >Jerusalem. Now Gaza may or may not be considered “Occupied Territories” but if you want Gaza weather, you’d be out of luck.

OK, ok I get it. Yahoo decided to change its classification system to something that reflects a dominant international consensus on the status of Jerusalem. Fine. I don’t agree of course, but I get it. What I don’t get is that if you look closely, the location information for both East and West Jerusalem on the app is exactly the same!

Uhm, can you say fail?

The Weather Channel has only one setting – Jerusalem, Israel. The same applies in Google maps and Google Earth. The Weather channel’s free app seems like a good alternative to Yahoo’s confused and jumbled app. Maybe, what we should do, is delete the Yahoo app and switch?

Hat tip to Rachel Bookstein.

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ck

Founder and Publisher of Jewlicious, David Abitbol lives in Jerusalem with his wife, newborn daughter and toddler son. Blogging as "ck" he's been blocked on twitter by the right and the left, so he's doing something right.

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16 Comments

  • Oh, now I know where Jerusalem went… I had Jerusalem saved as one of the locations in MyYahoo, and at some point it was gone. I didn’t put any thought into it because Brooklyn had already disappeared twice by then. What a cowardish thing of Yahoo to do this without any prior announcement.

  • I noticed this on my iPod touch, too. How freaking ridiculous. Unfortunately, you can’t delete the Yahoo app from the iPod touch.

  • Alex,

    Yes you can delete apps from the Touch. Log into iTunes on your computer, find the app, delete and sync.

  • I’d be glad to delete that app. Tech companies have no business endorsing or drawing geo-political lines. The question is, does it hurt them somehow financially to delete the app, or will it just make it harder for me to figure out the day’s weather? Can anyone suggest an app I can use in instead?

  • Well, at least we’re not at the point yet where they’re replacing “Israel” with “Palestine.”

    [Israel AND Palestine would be ideal; I’m not referring to that.]

    Anyway, I agree that tech companies have no business drawing international borders. Also, what a waste! They’ll just be entering the same information twice.

  • Can anyone suggest an app I can use in instead?

    I’m not sure if there’s an iphone app, but accuweather’s dashboard widget (mac) still only has Jerusalem, without the fictitious east and west cities.

  • I call on anyone with a conscience to stop buying apple products altogether.
    They have no right blaming yahoo for their choices….!

  • I tried Yahoo! and weather.com: no change. This is only an Apple iPhone thing. Either the programmer went rogue, or Steve Jobs became a Coolaid Drinker. Either way, Apple is responsible. I believe asking AT&T to complain to Apple might get results.