Apple Acquires Weather App Dark Sky

[Nicky G]

edit: Keep giving those thumbsdown. Each person below that did has bought in to the Dark Sky marketing. Neither your phone or their API can give you a real-time hyperlocal forecast.

Except -- many of us use it, and find those very forecasts to be freakily good.

What annoys me is that Weatherline uses the real time forecast API, so that will go away eventually. I love Weatherline (I subscribe) -- and I'll still use it, as the real time forecasts are not why I use it (but it is a nice feature).

 

[mi7chy]

Just tried Dark Sky to see what the hype is. App is good but weather data is off by -8F compared to AcuRite digital thermometer while National Weather Service weather.gov is closest at -2F.

 

[cmaier]

Apple really is screwing over a lot of people by shutting down the API. I think an anti-regulatory review is needed as big boy Apple is strong arming a lot of smaller businesses and projects.

How is this strong-arming anyone? They aren’t bullying or intimidating anyone. They aren’t forcing anyone else to shut down anything.

 

[Defthand]

Weather Forecast and Weather Forecast Accuracy for Your City

5-day weather forecasts for the United States in a nice, easy to read format, AND the 1- to 3-day out accuracy of other weather forecasters (Accuweather, The Weather Channel, MyForecast.com, Intellicast, and the National Weather Service) including links to their forecasts.

www.forecastadvisor.com

You can go to this site and enter your zip code to compare the accuracy of the various weather providers. For my zip in California Dark Sky does not do so well. Might be better where you live.

View attachment 902561

Interesting. The Weather Channel and Weather Underground are IBM holdings. AccuWeather might be as well. I was a fan of Weather Underground. It was the most accurate for me because it crowd-sourced its weather monitoring from hundreds of thousands of residential weather monitors, including a dozen within a 10 mile radius of our home). Unfortunately, the devs at the Weather Channel took over the app’s UX and f***ed it up, and marketing decided to switch to a subscription model.

 

[odin]

Those 'results' don't have anything to do with Dark Sky itself. Simply looking at the radar would have given you that same information...

I'm sorry, this is just a ridiculous assertion. Do you just walk around with a radar view? Do you keep one up the entire time you're driving? I don't know where you live, but where I live a thunderstorm or brief rainstorm can pop up with no prior visual indicator pretty quickly. And I certainly don't have the time nor the desire to constantly monitor an app or screen for radar changes.

DarkSky isn't perfect but it works damn well where I live and it has done so for years after I paid a low fee with no ads, and nothing annoying. Almost none of the other apps are as clean and without pushy ads or whatnot.

 

[danny842003]

Okay, now how about Apple starts porting their radar to CarPlay?

why would you need a weather radar whilst driving? Shouldn’t you be looking at the road?
Apple is pretty selective on what goes on to CarPlay so I wouldn’t expect it to happen.

 

[tennisproha]

Two sides to this news. One the one hand it’s great IF they make it free and integrate into the existing stock app that uses TWC and Yahoo! lol. On the other hand, I use Hello Weather, which is fantastic, but uses Dark Sky data so it sucks that they are not open sourcing that.

The ideal solution is to now buy Hello Weather and make that the stock app.

 

[BigMcGuire]

Just tried Dark Sky to see what the hype is. App is good but weather data is off by -8F compared to AcuRite digital thermometer while National Weather Service weather.gov is closest at -2F.

Yeah, ever since WU went away for me, accuracy has always suffered. Weather.Gov has always been the most accurate for me as well - I end up going there most of the time.

For my Apple Devices I use AccuWeather with Carrot.

 

[Wags]

Well maybe we’ll finally get an iPad weather app.

Maybe Apple will acquire a calculator app company and we can that too For the iPad.

 

[Abazigal]

Maybe Apple will acquire a calculator app company and we can that too For the iPad.

Well, PCalc is still free last I checked.

 

[btbeme]

Weather Forecast and Weather Forecast Accuracy for Your City

5-day weather forecasts for the United States in a nice, easy to read format, AND the 1- to 3-day out accuracy of other weather forecasters (Accuweather, The Weather Channel, MyForecast.com, Intellicast, and the National Weather Service) including links to their forecasts.

www.forecastadvisor.com

You can go to this site and enter your zip code to compare the accuracy of the various weather providers. For my zip in California Dark Sky does not do so well. Might be better where you live.

View attachment 902561

If all you want is accuracy for the day's high and low and overall precipitation forecast, and aren't really concerned with hourly (or finer-grained) accuracy for all conditions, then the "Big Three" do just fine. However, they fall short on predicting accurately (or dont even have a model) for local, local, local up to the moment conditions that can warn me about, say, a stray shower that can mess up my outdoor painting project a few minutes from now. That's the value in some of the other apps, and I have found Dark Sky to be uncanny in telling me what is sneaking up behind me five or ten minutes from now. For me, its much more valuable than knowing that the high was actually 87 when it was forecast to be 85.

 

[markgpearse]

Great News. I love this app

 

[Poisednoise]

As others have said, this app’s accuracy relies very much on what it’s being fed. It’s totally useless when I’m in rural Nova Scotia. But when I’m in NW London (UK) where I live, it never puts a foot wrong, because of all the local weather stations its getting information from.

If it says it’s starting to rain in 20 minutes, you can be sure that you’ve got at least 18 minutes to get to the shops and back without needing an umbrella. You can also be sure that if you’re still outside in 22 minutes, you’re getting wet. For local forecasting (in geography and time) in urban environments, it‘s freakishly good. And if it ever DOES get it wrong (which I used to experience occasionally about 6-7 years ago) you can report what’s actually going on through the app.

 

[McG2k1]

Maybe they can turn this app around. It used to be amazing and now it’s useless inaccurate garbage. Switched to AccuWeather and it’s been tolerable, but not as magical as Dark Sky was 3 or 4 years ago.

 

[Monque]

Not their secret sauce, the hyperlocal precipitation forecast (wavy line chart), when you're away from the US NEXRAD coverage on the border.

As their docs explain

Ah, okay – I tried entering a US address and I see what you mean.

 

[TrenttonY]

Finally we will get radar in the weather.app.

 

[ob81]

This is my most used app of all time. Wry accurate.

 

[Jury]

Aside from data accuracy, Dark sky is a huge downgrade that looks so dull and the evil Apple employees are probably doing something bad. Beware!

 

[JWiLL1988]

I would like to know the backstory on why DarkSky sold out to Apple.

Money

 

[Jury]

actually the app itself is pretty terribly in terms of design.

clearly apple wants to roll the dark sky tech into their weather app.

Agreed. Evil Apple employees are like the horrible design.

 

[sidewinder3000]

I would guess that Apple didn't want to depend on the Weather Channel for weather data.

I wish Apple would buy the Transit app and bake it into Maps. Their bike directions are pretty good and especially useful in the Age of the Virus.

Good call, I’m sure the data/dependency thing is part of it. I’m also wondering if they are buying the dev team with plans to build out some AR features in the native Weather app In addition to the hyper-local thing.

Transit is also great at giving you voice alerts when riding on the train telling you when your stop is coming up, so you dont space out and miss it. Great feature that makes taking the train way less stressful. I’d love to see them buy Transit as well.

 

[Tech198]

For some reason, i can't help feeling why Yahoo weather has been shutted off, at least the widget.

 

[Vjosullivan]

Surprised Apple didn't rip off the idea then booted the original app from app store like they've done done in the past. Good for dev.

It looks like they killing off Android and other apps. So not so good for those devs. There are also lots of other weather (and non-weather) apps that use the Dark Sky API as a source for their weather data. Apple is shutting that down, too.

Apple buys weather app Dark Sky

The iPhone maker will shut down the Android and Wear OS versions of the app in July.

www.bbc.co.uk

[automerge]1585730860[/automerge]

dark sky is their own data source.

Is it? Do they have their own weather stations all over the world?

 

[Morgenland]

Which weather data does the app access internationally? Or does it just support America? Any clues?

 

[Matz]

I’ve used DS on my AW for about 6 months, and generally like it. It has to be manually refreshed on occasion, though.
Apparently it’s fairly accurate (and improving) in southern Virginia.