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this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2025
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No this implies you get a choice, which you don't. You can get it for free and sell your data, or you can pay for it...and still also sell your data. The real money is in the data, they won't give that up...ever.
Can you use an open source weather app, or is the problem deeper than that?
Many phones come with a weather app you can neither uninstall nor disable.
you can deny location position to your weather app. show the weather for cities you are interested in. Get weather by notifications for "seemlessness"
Yeah, I was just curious if the app could harvest it anyway via the SDK or something.
the weather app can't. Your cell provider can without any phone permissions. Google/Apple secretly could as well. These companies love your government more than they love you.
I'm not the person who posted the widget issue, but IME many FOSS solutions (not just weather-related) are more often than not aesthetically/UX crap.
Breezy Weather
Yeah, that's true. Often people will take the money from users AND from selling data. But you can (usually) verify if that's the case by checking the app's permissions required.
The point stands, however: you either pay for the software with money, or with data - with the only exception being the unusually rare FOSS project here and there, which either lives in relative obscurity or grows to become large enough for the creators to either start requiring money, or just fold under the load...