Using OpenWeatherMap for countries outside the U.S.

[IoIxD]

https://openweathermap.org/

The immediate downside to using OpenWeatherMap would be that not only does it require an account, but the free tier does not give as much information as api.weather.gov alone (although what it does give is good enough for the main screen). The upsides, however, are that A. It's a bit faster to retrieve data, thanks to data caching and multiple sources^[1] B. This would work for states outside the US, particularly Canada. Of course, this is based on the Weather Channel within the US, but it would still be cool to have this as an option.

I'm curious as to why else this might not be used. If there's no other reason, I'm interested in helping implement this as an option for countries outside of the US.

[netbymatt]

I agree that outside the US forecasts would be a nice addition. But browsing the openweathermap api docs tells me that there would be significant changes to what information could be displayed. Two major items are text descriptions of the weather over the next few days (Local Forecast) and nearby weather stations (Latest Observations, Regional Observations, Regional Forecast). We'd also have to go through the effort of creating world maps in the style of the Weatherstar for anywhere that you could request a forecast. It would be a lot of effort.

There's also the unfortunate paywall issue which I don't want to burden this fork of the app with. The paywall problem also comes up with adding back in some other original screens: https://github.com/netbymatt/ws4kp/issues/15

[IoIxD]

Regarding the latter part, I thought I implied this in the post but the paywalled screens can be left out for other countries, hence why the project would continue to use both.