Personally I’ve never wanted to make a weather app, but then I got an email from Google saying that their new AI based weather forecast model, which is supposed to be cutting edge, is now available for unlimited free experimental preview.
I’ve always found the precipitation forecasts to be quite poor in Mongolia. Since 2011 Mongolia’s National Agency for Meteorology and Environmental Monitoring (NAMEM) have used a [Cray](National Agency for Meteorology and Environmental Monitoring) super computer for forecasting. It works, but gets hourly precipitation wrong quite often. They are directionally correct, but they usually don’t help me in deciding to take an umbrella or not on a given day.
So when I got the email, I thought, why don’t I see how good it is? The best way to do that is to throw up a simple web app and test it over the next few weeks. So I go over to the console, enable the API, get a key, then ask Codex to whip it up.
It refuses….
The rationale is that 21.1 of the Google Maps Platform Service Specific Terms specifically prohibits this…
- Weather API 21.1 Restrictions. Customers may not use Google Maps Content retrieved from Weather API to recreate a Google service or product (e.g. use data retrieved from Weather API in a weather app or weather model whose primary purpose is to provide weather information).
Codex helpfully nudged me into something that would tell me if I should take an umbrella or not. An app that tells me to take an umbrella or not is a weather app, albeit one that gives a binary signal rather than a precipitation percentage.
So if I make an app where the primary purpose is giving the news but I want to throw weather at the top that is fine. But if I want to make an app to test out this new weather API that is not, according to their own conditions. So to test out a weather API I need to make an app where the purpose isn’t weather. Lovely…
Update: I explained the silliness of this refusal and said that I’m just testing the API. It went ahead and built it. weather.robertritz.com is live and I’ll see if this API is any good.
