Adding unlisted locations to the HTC Sense Weather app

The HTC Sense Weather app which comes with the HTC Sensation, has a database which has a predefined set of locations for which it can fetch weather data. But the problem with this is that many locations which you might want to check forecasts for might not be available in it's database. For example, I wanted to list forecasts for Siolim, Goa, India, but the weather app did not have this in it's database. Which means that I just would not be able to have weather forecasts for Siolim, Goa on my phone. But then, I also found out that when I'm in Siolim, I was able to get weather forecasts for Siolim. Later, once when I was googling out about this "issue", I came across a few articles which suggested that it was "possible" to add unlisted locations to the weather app database. For this, you would basically have to "root" your phone and then edit the database file to add your desired locations.

Android is an operating system based on Linux, which means you can do with it most of the things you would do with Linux. But it also means that you cannot really access files which do not belong to you unless you are "root" or access to those is granted to you. Now, the problem here is, that on Android, the root account is disabled. This is mainly for security reasons as most of the users of Android might not "understand" what it means to have root enabled on their phones. But, this also means that you do not have any way to fiddle around with your phone the way you would want to. So, in simple words, "rooting" is hacking into your android phone to get root access on your phone. Now, that you know what is rooting, you should also know this, that Rooting voids the warranty on your phone, hence if something goes wrong, your warranty will no longer be valid on your rooted phone. However, should anything go wrong with your phone for which you need to avail of the warranty, then you can always do a hard reset on your phone which will basically wipe off everything from your phone and bring it back to the original factory state. This would mean that your phone is still under warranty.

Thus, first you'll have to root your phone in order to modify the weather app's database. There are many ways to root android phones, many of which you can simply google out. In the case of HTC Sensation, as of now, there isn't a method to root it that I know of, however there is a way to temp root it. Which means, your phone would be rooted temporarily and will get back to it's unrooted state when you restart your phone. To temp root your phone, you can use a script called fre3vo. You can download it here. Unzip the file, and take a note of the location where you have unzipped it. In order to use fre3vo, you would need ADB. ADB allows you to connect to your phone over USB using the USB debugging mode which you need to enable. In order to enable the USB debugging mode, you have to go to Settings>>Applications>>Development and enable the option for the USB debugging mode. After doing that you can connect your phone via USB to your computer/laptop. After doing this, you would need to start ADB. To do this, open a terminal window/command line window, switch to the root account on your system and navigate to the directory where adb is installed. There, type the following command:

./adb start-server


In order to make sure that your phone is connected to adb, run the following command and check the output:


./adb devices


You should be able to see your phone listed there. Now, that you've got your phone connected to adb, it's time to put fre3vo into action. Copy the unzipped fre3vo file into the /data/local/tmp/ directory on your phone by replacing "~/Downloads/fre3vo" with the location of that file on your system and then make it executable. To do this, execute the following commands:


./adb push ~/Downloads/fre3vo /data/local/tmp/
./adb shell chmod 777 /data/local/tmp/fre3vo


After doing this, you should be able to open a root shell prompt on your phone by running the following command in your terminal:


./adb shell


To verify that you're logged in as root, check what symbol you get at the command prompt, if you see '#', it means that your phone is rooted and you are logged in as root. This is a temp root, to revert back to the unrooted version, simply delete the fre3vo file using the following command and then restart your phone:


./adb shell rm /data/local/tmp/fre3vo


Now, we can get to the actual procedure of modifying the weather locations database. In order to do this, you would need to pull out the database file from your phone using ADB and then modify it using a tool like sqlite/sqliteman. After modifying the database file, you need to overwrite the existing file on your phone with the modified version. Let's see how this is done in detail:

First, use the adb pull command to pull out the database file from your phone. The database file for the weather app is located at /data/data/com.htc.provider.weather/files/WP_0409WWE.db. To pull this file, run the following command:


./adb pull /data/data/com.htc.provider.weather/files/WP_0409WWE.db /tmp/


tmpsqlite and open the database file in sqlite. The database file has two tables, android and locationlist. We need to look at the locationlist table. In the locationlist table, each location will have a row id, location code, location name, state, country, latitude, longitude, timezone and timezone id. Hence, for each location that you want to add, you need to have this data. The location code has to be in the accuweather format which is: 


<continent_code>|<country_code>|<state_code>|<location_name>


For Siolim, Goa, the code is as follows:


ASI|IN|IN011|SIOLIM


In order to verify that you've got the code correct, try out the following: Open up a browser, and try to access the following URL,

http://www.accuweather.com/quick-look.aspx?partner=accuweather&metric=0&loc=ASI|IN|IN011|SIOLIM

Make sure that you have replaced ASI|IN|IN011|SIOLIM with your code. If you're able to get the weather forecast for your location, then you're good to go. Go ahead and create a record in the locationlist table using sqlite filling in all the corresponding details for each of the locations you want to add. After you're done with that, you need to save the modified copy of the database.

Now, replace the database on your phone with the modified version of the database. You may use the following command to do this:


./adb push /tmp/WP_0409WWE.db /data/data/com.htc.provider.weather/files/WP_0409WWE.db


After this, stop adb using the following command:


./adb kill-server


Then, disconnect your phone from your computer and disable the USB debugging mode. Now simply restart your phone, and you should be able to add your location to the weather widget.