and she is actually kind of depressing. I live in Western PA, not Cupertino, where it can be +50 and sunny today and she will say “it doesn’t look so good today.” She needs to get out of her California sunshine bubble and realize that “good weather” is relative.
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Apple Acquires Weather App Dark Sky
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and she is actually kind of depressing. I live in Western PA, not Cupertino, where it can be +50 and sunny today and she will say “it doesn’t look so good today.” She needs to get out of her California sunshine bubble and realize that “good weather” is relative.
My only question is, why did they make it a one time purchase on iOS for the longest time, yet android users had to pay a subscription fee?
Otherwise, I am happy that Apple bought Dark Sky as it's my favorite app and having it natively built into iOS is a good thing in my opinion.
Otherwise, I am happy that Apple bought Dark Sky as it's my favorite app and having it natively built into iOS is a good thing in my opinion.
I am very happy and excited to see this. I normally stick with Apple's 1st party apps for most of my needs but I never felt like Apple's default weather app was nearly as good as some of the 3rd party apps. A few years ago I spent months trying out different weather apps and after extensive comparisons, I decided Dark Sky was the best weather apps for my needs. Can't wait to see how Apple integrates it into Apple Maps or what else they may do with it. Now if Apple would just buy INRIX for traffic data...
My only fear is if Apple’s integration still dumbed down the weather app compared to the standalone Dark Sky app.
Apple in general has been pretty lackluster in most of their first party apps especially in acquisitions. One of the more recent disappointments that comes to my mind is Texture
Huge possibilities with immediate weather condition insights in...basically everything, from exercise to maps, navigation, and AR.
Because it would be a handy thing to know if you're driving into a severe thunderstorm or tornado...
Main reason I went outside Apple Weather was radar. I mainly use Carrot but also use Dark Sky, Weather Underground and a few others are loaded but really don't open them. I too do the open 3 and average when I need to plan ahead.
Who needs a weather app when your people just sit around smoking the peace pipe in their igloos?
I very much agree. I have wanted weather info in CarPlay since I got my first CarPlay-capable head unit. It makes total sense... the outside temperature is already a fixture on most automobile instrument display panels... and knowing that you are heading into treacherous weather would be most beneficial, IMO.
It is puzzling why Apple doesn't allow this, considering that many built-in car subscription apps do put this on their displays. I have it on my Ram Pickup through Uconnect and the SiriusXM Travel Link system. It's just as important as GPS navigation, and can be life-saving.
Apple may use the excuse of not wanting drivers to be playing with the display too much, but a weather map is a glance thing. I have some apps on my CarPlay that make you do gymnastics to operate, so it's a lousy excuse if that's why they're restricting this info.
No, they do not have their own weather stations. What they have is a large ML system that takes data from many different sources and uses it to synthesize weather info that can be very accurate for a specific location. The JSON output from the API lists the specific sources used for the data being sent (it's really a nice API and data source, going to be annoying to have it go away). There's some nice, but rather old (2011) explanation of how it works (or how it did originally), here: "How Dark Sky Works | jackadamblog".
Great... They bought the most overhyped weather app on the App Store.
"known for its accuracy"
Sorry. I can't catch my breath from laughing so much.
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.
You know how many times it saved my ass? Many times! And in Ireland, where the weather changes 20 times a day.
Maybe they're thinking of adding quite a bit to the native weather app. At this point it's really as simple as simple gets.
It's not just the US, and it uses a wide variety of sources (including many of the government-run weather services), which vary depending on the location (lat/long) for which you request the weather. I don't have a complete list at hand. It feeds the data at hand for your area into a big algorithm to come up with a cohesive set of predictions, per minute for the next hour, per hour for the next 48 hours, and per day for the next week.
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Developer talent yes, but not for "yet another weather app" (there are plenty of people making those). Rather, they're grabbing it for the developers who made the back-end system that synthesizes together many different weather data sources and generates the predictions for the requested area. Dark Sky built a very good system for this, and many other well-known weather apps have been using (buying) their data. Now Apple won't have to buy this kind of ready-to-use weather data from Yahoo or Accuweather or Dark Sky, they'll have their own source that they control and can change/expand as they see fit. Apple has a long history of wanting to control things that they previously had to depend on others for, so the move is understandable, but...
I'm just really sad to see this go - it'll make Apple's weather apps a lot better, but it'll break my own home weather system that I built with Raspberry Pi's and 15k lines of python. I'll have to find a replacement data source and rewrite a whole bunch of code, and the new source will never match exactly what Dark Sky was giving, so I'll end up with an annoying before/after break in my historical data (which goes back 3-4 years at this point).
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They could easily make it an optional overlay layer for the navigation screen. Kind of surprised that Waze hasn’t done that yet.
Awful news, I loved using Dark Sky on my desktop for years and now Apple is killing it. Hopefully they relaunch a desktop version with Apple branding but I won’t be holding my breath.
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What does your home weather system do? Sounds very interesting.
One Raspberry Pi uses an Arduino with a custom shield (a WxShield, long since discontinued) to collect temperature/pressure/humidity data from a handful of commercially available sensors inside/outside the house and send the data (via MQTT) to another Pi that maintains a database of weather data. This second Pi also pulls down local data from Dark Sky (via their API) every five minutes, and publishes both the in-house and Dark Sky data (and some historical summaries) to the local network (using MQTT). Two other Pi's read that data and display it continuously on attached touchscreens - these "front-end" Pi's display NTP-sync'd clocks and weather information, and also serve as touchscreen interfaces for my Hue lights (yet another Pi is merely a very accurate clock). It’s all color-coded to heck, so I can quickly get a sense of the conditions from across the room, even if I can’t completely read the display (e.g. the temperatures change color in 5° bands, from purple around freezing, across the spectrum, up to light red above 100°). And I put a light sensor on one of the Pi's, which is sampled every 15 seconds and used to adjust the display brightness on the 3 Pi's that have screens. I don't have large outside sensors like an anemometer attached, so, for instance, the wind information comes from Dark Sky (along with the forecasts). Dark Sky, in turn, is getting it from a traditional PWS (personal weather station) that's about a mile away from my house - good enough for my purposes. The system also periodically uploads screenshots and data to a website of mine, so I can keep track of it remotely. It's been an off-and-on side project since 2016, though the vast majority of development was 2016-2018, because I already added most of the things I wanted. I still tinker with it from time to time. And, since all the data is sent back and forth in standard formats, I could replace various bits and have the rest continue to function (if, say, I put an anemometer up outside). And this is the kind of thing I'll have to do before Dark Sky's API goes away - survey the other providers, select one (possibly weather.gov), and build code to collect data from them and massage it into the format I need (and, along the way, find numerous assumptions I've made while getting too cozy with Dark Sky's data). It'll mean changing a few thousand lines of code.
Here's a screenshot of the main touch panel display (the stripe down the right edge are touch controls for the Hue lights):
And this is a web page that (aside from the sunrise/set info at the bottom) is essentially a compact visual translation of the interesting bits of the Dark Sky forecast information:
All told it's about 15k lines of Python 3, and involved a lot of fun learning and exploration and going down all sorts of interesting rabbit holes (e.g. the WxShield board came with a huge C# GUI program to read and display the data - they'd intended it as a Windows-only thing - I translated about 4k lines of C# into Python and simmered it down to just the parts I needed for data extraction from the Arduino in a "headless" environment - now, instead it collects the data, translates it into usable form and transmits it via MQTT as it arrives - every 20 seconds or so for the last 4 years, aside from a couple of power failures).
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