Acknowledged
4 months ago

Wrong observationLocationName (and maybe conditions?) since late November's firmware updates

Hi all,

I have some custom watch faces on ConnectIQ that have the observationLocationName being displayed by default, meaning that any change on the location name is easily noticeable. I use those watch faces myself for more than 2 years and they always showed me the correct location name (Dublin, Ireland). However, I noticed that just after early December's firmware update (11.16 on my Venu 2s, if I'm not wrong), the location name automatically changed to a location that is around 20km from me (Dublin Airport).

That would be not too bad by itself, if it weren't for the 2 below reasons:

  1. The name change happens instantly after the firmware update;
  2. Ever since late November (24th, to be precise), I started receiving several (really, a lot of those) feedbacks from my watch faces' users telling me about the same thing, from all watch series (fenix, forerunner, epix gen 2, MARQ, etc.). That first feedback was from a user of an Epix 2 after the update to firmware 10.43. Those feedbacks are also spread all over the world (so not just in Ireland), across many different countries and they mention that the new location names are between 20 to 60km away from the previous one (depending on the person);

The name has been wrong since then, for about 4 months now. I've been to another country in the meantime and it was also showing "airport" instead of the city name, but since it was my first time there I can't confirm if there was a city name previously. But when I'm at home, can confirm that is still show airport that is 20km to the northwest of my actual location and the current weather condition that I see on my watch face is also the same one being shown on Garmin's default weather widget, which leads me to think that weather information might also be from the wrong location.

Just to make one more thing clear here, the issue is not only with my watch faces. I have installed other custom connectIQ faces that can also show the location name and they show exactly the same location name as mine. So to me it is either a change in the SDK that Garmin did not communicate, or it is indeed a bug. Could someone please clarify?

Thanks!

Felipe
  • over 2 years ago in reply to Felipe

    It wasn't a firmware change.  It was wither a change in GCM, or the weather provider used by Garmin

  • over 2 years ago in reply to jim_m_58

    Thanks for the explanation, . I did try to search for this issue on the discussion before, but couldn't find anything similar, only old threads about names (I was likely using the wrong words). 

    I guess the whole issue with users (me included) complaining about the name change has to do with Garmin not providing any info on the firmware release notes about this. If you don't have notes about this and it changes all of a sudden, then first thing that comes to mind is that it is a bug.

    But now that you explained it, I can see how it makes sense... it now matches with the api docs (weather location, not user location).

  • over 2 years ago

    This has come up a few times before.  And it's not a bug, but a bug fix.

    In the past "observationLocationName" was where you and your phone were, not where the weather was observed - where the weather station that reported the data is located - and an airport is a common place for weather stations.

    In the past, it would show the suburb I was in, but the actual weather there was often different that what I saw in the data.  In my case, the actual weather station was located on the other side of a small mountain.  So the "observationLocationName" really wasn't the suburb I was in, but it was observed at the Airport, and now, that's what I see - where the weather was actually observed.

  • over 2 years ago

    search the discussion forum, this question is asked and answered there every coupe of weeks...