Apple wants to keep you and your companions up-to-date on weather changes when you’re traveling

Apple wants your iPhone to keep you and your companions up-to-date on the weather based on your travel plans. The tech giant has been granted a patent (number 11,256,731) for “dynamic location search suggestions based on travel itineraries.” 

About the patent

In the patent, Apple notes that smart phones provide access to numerous sources of data and can run applications that organize and allow searching of information for specific topics. For example, weather applications may allow users to search for and/or select locations (e.g., cities) and to store the selected locations for use in retrieving information about local weather conditions, forecasts, radar, etc. 

The location data can be persisted in the application such that each time the application is opened, the local information can be updated for each of the stored locations. Other types of applications can perform similar operations to, for example, retrieve other types of local information for one or more selected locations each time an application is opened or activated from a background or hibernation state. 

In addition to allowing users to search for locations, some applications may allow the use of a current location, as detected through a global positioning satellite device or other positioning technique. 

Providing weather info based on travel plans will involve interaction between the Weather and Maps app on an iPhone.

Summary of the patent

Here’s Apple’s abstract of the patent: “Methods, systems, and apparatus, including computer programs encoded on a computer storage medium, for retrieving local information on a user device include detecting itinerary information stored by a first application on a user device, and identifying a travel destination based on the detected itinerary information. 

“The travel destination is communicated to a second application executable on a user device, and the travel destination is stored in association with the second application. The second application is adapted to retrieve local information based on an identified geographic location, and local information for the travel destination is provided through the second application in response to a user interaction with the second application and based on a triggering threshold associated with the itinerary information.”