Weather App/WIdget

Mudita Products
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I was surprised to see that the Weather app (as well as chess, etc) cannot be removed, only hidden. The weather widget cannot be hidden or disabled at all. You can remove these on just about any phone, in a way this makes an iPhone more of a minimalist phone.

This means your data plan is used to refresh the weather widget whether or not you want to use it. I have found a messy solution, I uninstalled the weather app via ADB, and this causes the weather widget to display No Weather Data, but if you tap on it, the launcher crashes. This isn’t ideal, I don’t see why I should have to hack a Minimalist phone to not display Information.

Now on to my crazy weather rant,
I do not believe in weather forecasts for multiple reasons, the first is they are so often wrong. I actually wouldn’t have gotten my Kompakt until today if it weren’t for my friend paying attention to the weather forecast. Yesterday we doing some labour unloading trucks in SoHo and were going to go to some art galleries after but he said it was going to rain in an hour, we decided to both go home instead, and when I got home I noticed that my Kompakt was ready for pickup. The point of this story? It never rained. Great I got to play with my new device, but it was instead of spending time checking out art with my friend. But my more important reason is that, I am trying to live Now, ya know Ram Dass, Be Here Now. I don’t want to hear about tomorrow, there is no tomorrow, there is no past, there is only now, and every prediction of the future pulls me away from a beautiful state of joy that one can achieve by being present. Weather forecasts and clocks, I have only felt prevent me from getting to that.

These two points are actually related you see, the weather forecast wouldn’t prevent one from living in the moment, if it were 100% accurate. But it isn’t, is it an Imagined future, one that often does not exist. Yesterday I imagined rain, it was a figment of my imagination because it never happened, it only exists in our imagination. Todays night fall or tomorrows sunrise do not bring me away from the moment, because they are not possibilities, they are constants.

I believe the weather, the camera, chess, etc. should be delete-able, only brought back by factory reset, or possibly controlled by Mudita Center. I otherwise would not call the Kompakt a minimalist phone.

About the camera, I have come to terms with carrying a camera, but I still prefer to spend some time going without one. Allan Watts put it well, “The first time I traveled to Japan with a camera, I felt myself grasping at life, rather than living it”.

P.S. I do get rained on, and it is terribly fun.

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Apologies for how crazzzzyy this post is, but I do feel crazy. I spent hours learning how to use ADB in the terminal, it’s totally wound my mind up. But I had to install various replacement apps since as we well know many of the stock apps are not ready. I also had to spend time figuring how to remove features. This hack job was not the experience I had with the Light Phone, it worked and was minimal as much as I liked out of the box. But the hardware of the Light Phone is not very good, nor it’s over the top small size. The hardware, size, keyboard, etc of the Kompakt are fantastic!

Anyway, going to go chill out now :sweat_smile:

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I think if you turn you phone OFF, then the sending and receiving signal components are powered off. Certainly no weather data will be requested or received…

It would be interesting to know how much background activity there is with only the standard supplied apps. Perhaps something that was not considered in the design.

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I’d love to check if there’s any weather data downloaded in the background. At least the screen updates after displaying the old data.

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The real kicker is that the data used by the default Weather app is inaccurate resulting in wholly unreliable forecasts. I’d really like to use the Met Office weather app (in the UK where I live), but it relies on Google Play services. Every other weather app seems to be over-engineered dross designed to hoover up your data.

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@nownotlater This might be the most poetic takedown of a weather widget I’ve ever read.
I love the weather app, but you make a great point though- about how forecasting an imagined future does tug us away from presence. I’ll ask our team about this.

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I am 100% with you on this. Marketers sell you certainty and weather channels are no different. Even worse, I’ve noticed bad storms to be a bit fetishized recently. Now I won’t lie, I love a good storm, but nowadays i think I am being fear mongered into checking the weather forecast. And you’re right- it’s almost always wrong. Ironically, the closest a tornado has ever come to my residence was never forecasted. There wasnt even a storm in the forecast!

And don’t even get me started on people who panic buy milk, bread, and toilet paper if it so happens to be extraordinarily rainy. I used to trust forecasts until I realized I was pretty much being duped. That, and it has started to blend in with all the other fear porn in the news cycles lately. The future has and will always remain unpredictable.

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Thank you, @The. Since I got my Kompakt and started to use the native Weather app, I have started to wonder whether I need as much detail as what the sideloaded Breezy Weather app provides.

Frankly, I miss how Sunbeam Wireless presents weather on its flip-phones – just enough but not too much, in my opinion. Kompakt’s native Weather app is a bit too limited for me, but Breezy Weather is excessively detailed.

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