BinClockWidget Clocks and Alarms app for Android description
An AMOLED-black, monochrome binary-clock Android home-screen widget.
It renders the current time and date as a 6×4 grid of dots. Cells that would otherwise go unused carry a couple of small extras: the device alarm state and a weather glyph. The aesthetic is deliberately austere — solid dots on true black, no chrome, no colour — so it disappears into an AMOLED wallpaper and sips battery.
How to read it
The face is a grid of rows (values) and columns (place values):
- Rows encode, top to bottom: hours, minutes, day (of month), month.
- Columns are binary place values: 32 · 16 · 8 · 4 · 2 · 1.
- A lit (solid) dot means that place value is on; an unlit dot is off. Add the lit columns in a row to read that row's number.
For example, a minutes row with the 32, 8, and 2 dots lit reads 32 + 8 + 2 = 42.
The cells not needed by the low-value ends of the shorter rows are reused to show the alarm state and a weather condition glyph.
Weather, network & privacy
Weather is off by default and opt-in: on a fresh install the widget makes no network or location calls, and no weather glyph is shown. Weather stays entirely dormant until you enter a weather server URL in the widget settings.
When you turn it on, weather uses the keyless Open-Meteo API. Tapping Use Open-Meteo fills in the public endpoint (https://api.open-meteo.com/), which is then contacted over the INTERNET permission to fetch current conditions and a short forecast. You can instead point the setting at your own self-hosted Open-Meteo instance — any http(s) URL is accepted.
With weather on, the widget also needs coarse location (ACCESS_COARSE_LOCATION) to fetch conditions for where you are. Location is read via the platform LocationManager only — there are no Google Play Services, no fused/Play location, and no proprietary SDKs. The coordinates are sent only to the weather server you configured, and only while weather is enabled.
