OnePlus users are suffering from what appears to be a seriously annoying bug that makes browsing the web and using apps not just difficult, but tedious.
Advertisements playing up in OxygenOS. Stale forecasts on OnePlus phones and wearables.
— Abhishek Yad. Click here to read full details. Source: https://www.androidpolice.com/2022/01/06/onepluss-weather-app-is-showing-stale-data-across-phones-and-smartwatches-including-wear-os-labels-hashtag-a-qarthowpenandroiduigoogle
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The problems appear across many devices and software versions, indicating that the issue is likely server-side rather than a bug related to specific hardware or an update.
What Some OnePlus Users Are Experiencing
On user forums and social channels, watch owners grumble about home screen widgets that sit on yesterday’s highs, hourly panels that never populate, and watch faces that no longer refresh. The error banners are generic “location not found” and “network error” on affected OnePlus Watch models, while phones refuse to pull new data even when connected to strong Wi‑Fi or 5G.
Self-fixes—clearing cache and app data, reinstalling updates, toggling precise location, taking it out of battery optimization, or using a different location mode—have not brought those back. That troubleshooting pattern usually means the issue lives on the vendor’s servers or data provider up the line, rather than the device itself.
Phones, watches, and OxygenOS versions affected
Reports cover models ranging from recent flagships including the OnePlus 15 and 13, to past flagships and older devices, with OxygenOS 14, 15, and 16 all featuring among the members of the list.
Owners of smartwatches, including OnePlus Watch 3 owners, report the same behavior — indicating phone widgets and watch complications are driven by the same backend.
Some users in Europe and India, however, have responded that their Weather app works just fine at the moment, so there may be a region- or account-scoped service disruption. That is in line with content delivery networks or geofenced API endpoints misbehaving in particular regions.
The Most Likely Culprit: A Server Glitch
Considerations
The built-in weather apps usually make use of centralized endpoints that consume feeds from third-party meteorological services and push them to devices. When authentication tokens expire, when you go over on your API calls or quotas, or when one of the regional nodes goes down, devices across many software versions will inexplicably stop updating all at once.
Similar dynamics have played out elsewhere. Apple’s Weather app experienced a much-publicized outage in 2023 when backend services became unavailable, and a number of Android OEMs have handled (much briefer) interruptions to weather APIs that required no device-side update. As a rule, vendors respond by pushing a silent server fix or downloading just enough app patch to fend off the attack.
Why this outage matters for everyday phone and watch use
Weather can be glanceable, and it’s baked right into phone home screens and watch faces. Commuters turn to hour-by-hour precipitation graphs, travelers look out for temperature fluctuations, and runners check the wind speed outside their door before lacing up. When the data freezes up, it makes the device feel unreliable, and that causes users to overcompensate by opening multiple apps or refreshing maps — which is a waste of time and battery.
Workarounds to try now while OnePlus resolves the issue
Until OnePlus repairs its service, the easiest fix is to turn to a third-party app for forecasts and widgets. Top options include:
- Google’s Weather
- The Weather Channel
- AccuWeather
- Windy
On OnePlus watches, selecting a watch face that doesn’t require the OnePlus Weather complication (even though it’s mostly out of your control which ones you’ll have access to) can help prevent those blank spaces from appearing — even though there really isn’t all that much variation between them.
If you’re interested to hear some steps from the device side (in case your unit is a weird one), you can try the following:
- Verify the Weather app’s location permission is set to “Allow all the time.”
- Make sure background data usage for mobile and Wi‑Fi is switched on.
- Remove any battery restrictions for the Weather app in settings.
- Delete the Weather app’s cache and data, then reboot the device.
Users have reported that these actions rarely work during this outage, but they’re not harmful to attempt.
What to expect from OnePlus while the outage persists
The company has not yet acknowledged the outage on its community forum or social channels at the time of publication. Based on the magnitude, I’d guess there will be a server-side fix. It’s possible that a minor Weather app update will roll out via the Play Store — or in the OnePlus App Store — at a later date. After the fix is rolled out, widgets and watch complications should begin updating to their normal schedules automatically.
If you have the stock Weather app disabled, follow user threads on OnePlus Community and popular Android forums for news of its return. There’s typically a wave of “it’s back” posts ahead of any official statement on an issue, and when services resume, re-updating your widgets and enabling any turned-off battery optimizations may restore smooth background updates.
Until then, you can get the basics from third-party weather tools. The larger lesson: superficial glanceable data is only as good as its backend. When it breaks, redundancy — an extra widget or a different app — keeps you in the loop until the vendor switches that back on.
