alt Hacker News15 years later and still no word from Google if they will use the barometers in Android devices to assimilate surface pressure data. It has been shown that this can improve forecast accuracy. I think IBM may be doing it with their weather apps, but Google/Apple would have dramatically more data available.
Apple even bought Dark Sky, which purported to do this but never released any information - so I doubt they really did do it. And if they did, I doubt Apple continued the practice.
Been waiting a long time to hear Google announce they'll use your barometer to give you a better forecast. Still waiting I guess.
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The community has mostly abandoned SPO data. It's extraordinarily difficult to use this data because of social issues like PII and technical ones like QA/QC. But even more importantly, there's very little compelling evidence that the data makes much of any difference whatsoever in real forecasts.
> 15 years later and still no word from Google if they will use the barometers in Android devices to assimilate surface pressure data.
For WeatherNext, the answer is 'no'. The paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10772) describes in detail what data the model uses, and direct assimilation of user barometric data is not on the list.