Apple Watches Were Crashing When Asked About the Weather (macrumors.com)

Yesterday MacRumor reported that "Asking Siri something like 'What's the temperature?' or 'What's the weather?' or 'Is it raining?' causes the Apple Watch to crash." The issue has been documented in several threads on the MacRumors forums and on Reddit, and we've also been able to replicate it on our own devices. Complaints about the problem appear to have started this morning, and the bug is confirmed to be affecting both LTE and GPS Apple Watch Series 3 models as well as older Apple Watch models running watchOS 4.1. Not all Apple Watch owners in all countries are affected, but it appears to be impacting users in the United States, Canada, and Europe.
The problem may have been caused by Daylight Savings Time, they reported yesterday, since "asking Siri about the weather tomorrow or next week doesn't cause a problem -- it's only questions about the current weather conditions that are resulting in errors."

Engadget confirms that "The issue appears to be over. We've checked both before and afterward, and it's now safe to ask Siri if it's raining."

Comments

Devs should do QA

[bobm]

Subject stolen from another story. :-)

Apple has had a lot issues with dates, clocks and alarms on the mobile devices. Including the interesting 1970 bug. https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2016/02/26/apple-will-unbrick-iphones-bricked-by-1970-bug/

Better QA might help but this shouldn't be so hard.

Re:Devs should do QA

[93 Escort Wagon]

To be fair, Apple hasn’t cornered the market on time-related bugs. Android’s had them too... and I still remember the ~ 30 patches Microsoft released trying to fix the Outlook/Exchange daylight saving calendar bug, back when the US redefined the start date (none of which actually solved the problem).

Still, Apple deserves any grief it’s getting over this. Maybe if they’d spent less time on that 3-D talking poop emoji...

Re:Devs should do QA

[Ecuador]

Well, actually Apple has quite a significant share of time-related bugs and it almost seems like they are trying to... ehm... "corner the DST market" ? :)
For example, I distinctly remember my iPhone forgetting to wake me up in time a few years ago after DST. From a quick search I see it was 2010. So, iOS 4.1 had a bug where repeating alarms did not work across DST change boundaries. What was infuriating about the bug is that Apple had ample warning, as 2-3 weeks before the Europe, it hit Australia and NZ. That was not enough time for a fix (Apple appears to have suggested "use non-repeating alarms" aka "you're doing it wrong"), so it hit Europe and, then, a week later the US as well. Then they had a DST bug in 2013 as well.

But of course apart from DST there have been other gems like the aforementioned 1970 bug...

And these are the high profile bugs, as a developer I know of subtle bugs that you have to work around since Apple declares them as "as designed" (for example, the date formatter "HH" may or may not be affected by the "24h time" slider in settings, depending on what is the default of that slider in the phone region.. ugh).

Clarification

[93 Escort Wagon]

I have a Series 1 Apple Watch, and as far as I can tell it wasn’t enough to ask it “what’s the weather?” - I had to add the qualifier “right now” to get my watch to respiring.

But yeah, silly bug. If Siri actually worked well, it might’ve been more annoying... but I can’t imagine too many people have the patience to use her as their primary means of interaction with the device. “I’ll tap you when I’m ready” gets old, really fast.

Re: Apple? It's SHIT

[Anonymous Coward]

It depends on the project. Your criticism explains why a lot of FOSS is doomed to obscurity, but the really successful Linux projects like Ubuntu, Fedora and Mint either have large corporate support and/or very active and helpful user communities.