Apple Watch Siri, Weather Crash Might Be Due To DST
Daylight Saving Time, or DST as its infamously known, is perhaps one of the strangest inventions of man still in use today. Considering how much technology, industry, and lifestyle has changed over the decades, DST might have minimal benefits to justify the confusion it brings, not just to those in' countries that observe it, but throughout the whole world. Apparently, it isn't just humans either. A recently discovered Apple Watch bug caused the wearable to "crash" when asking Siri about the current weather, all because it probably didn't grok DST, exactly like how many people don't.
The bug isn't a critically fatal one, but it is amusing nonetheless. Or annoying, if you are affected. If you ask Siri on your Apple Watch about the current weather, it will seemingly crash and restart. Funnily enough, if you ask it about the weather for a future day, it does just fine.
Without any confirmation or response from Apple, Apple Watch users have taken it upon themselves to try and investigate the matter themselves. That is made particularly more difficult because not all Apple Watches all over the world are affected. The persistent sleuths have narrowed the factors down to one thing: daylight saving time.
Asking for the weather of a country that doesn't observe DST works fine. Asking for a future date works fine as well. It was only when asking for "today's" date that Siri and the Weather app went bonkers. That's because DST ended November 5 for the US and Canada, throwing the whole world, and Siri, into a temporal flux.
To be clear, the whole Apple Watch isn't crashing, just the particular apps. It just goes through the spring-boarding process so it looks like it's restarting. While most of the affected models seem to be the Apple Watch Series 3, older models running the latest watchOS 4.1 have been reported to also exhibit the same behavior. It's a bug that can perhaps be easily fixed, but, considering Apple is based in the US, you'd think they'd already have this down to a 'T'.
VIA: MacRumors