Grab an umbrella if you’re headed to the Philippines, we guess?
Google’s At a Glance widget certainly lives up to its name, delivering useful info about scheduled events, travel plans, and more, all from your phone’s home screen. Beyond those useful reminders to guide you through your day, At a Glance can also help keep you safe by alerting you to dangerous weather conditions like severe winter storms or flash floods. For some reason, though, the widget is now warning users from all over the world about a storm in the Philippines.
Granted, that sounds like pretty useful information to have, and exactly the sort of thing we want to see from At a Glance … if we lived in the Philippines. Instead, Android users all over the globe report seeing this alert from PAGASA, the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration.
While that may have contributed to momentary panic, luckily we don’t seem to actually be looking at some global-scale superstorm event, and this is just a matter of the alert’s scope not being properly geo-restrained. We’ve reached out to Google for comment, curious what might have driven this glitch, and will update this post if we hear anything back.
UPDATE: 2021/12/20 18:37 EST BY STEPHEN SCHENCK
Google disables severe weather alerts
Well, we never did hear back from Google about why this originally happened, but it does look like some progress has been made towards “fixing” the situation, all the same. If you now go into your At a Glance settings, you’ll find that the toggle for severe weather alerts is disabled.
What’s more, if you manually flip that on, Google will just ignore your preference, and the next time you check it will be switched back off. We suppose that does accomplish the goal of avoiding false alarms, but we’d kind of prefer if we could still get the correct alerts, all the same. As such, this looks a lot more like a quick work-around than a proper fix.
Thanks: Narek
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