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Jerusalem – Yahoo Weather iPhone App FAIL

11 years ago
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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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