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Apple Pushes Dark Sky Users to Revamped Weather App as Shutdown Looms
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Yes, it’s the second “tile” above the hourly forecast and below the winter storm warning….wait, I guess you are on to something. Still would like to not have it show iPhone mini doesn’t have the screen real estate and have to scroll to get to the outlook.
What's cool about Carrot is that you can quick swap weather sources (just to compare current weather data versus setting your default source) via the button on the upper right.
Reading this thread is like reading an Ad for Dark Sky weather app. I want to try it now.
Carrot is fun. I wish they had more Carrot like apps. Perhaps a Carrot Camera app that says "Say Cheese" and make comments about your photos using AI.
I’ve really struggled to find a weather app that is both accurate and easy to use – so I thought I would share some research I have done into this. Weather apps make big promises about predicting to the minute any rain or snow that is coming your way, but living in the north of Scotland I have found that the reality doesn’t live up to the hype, although Dark Sky seemed to get things right more often than not.
When Apple shut down the Dark Sky app I had read that the Carrot Weather app provides an option to set an interface that is almost identical to the Dark Sky app and it gives users a free 7 day trial of their ‘ultra premium’ offering, which allows unlimited switching between seven different weather data providers. One of these providers is still Dark Sky, as they are still providing weather data to apps until 31 March 2023, even though Apple has removed the specific Dark Sky app itself.
So Carrot sounded good – but what about the accuracy? Before jumping in and signing up to a subscription to the app I tested each of the seven sources, by checking the current and next hour weather at my location and seeing if the source was accurate various times each day over a period of 4 days. What I found was actually quite surprising.
For my location in Scotland, of the seven sources, the Dark Sky source was the most accurate – accurately predicting the current and next hour’s weather 67% of the time. The next most accurate was Foreca, who got it right 62% of the time. The two least accurate were Aeris with 33% accuracy, and Apple with 38% accuracy. Considering that Apple has integrated the Dark Sky technology into their weather it looks like they have done a bad job since they are less accurate that Dark Sky by some considerable way.
I also checked each evening to see the forecast for the next morning – on each day every single source got the weather forecast wrong, including failing to forecast some very heavy snow that fell during rush hour.
So my conclusion? If you live in Scotland, or I imagine anywhere else hilly, mountainous, or near an ocean – somewhere with changeable weather (i.e most of the UK, Ireland, and the Nordic Countries) then an app’s claims to have minute to minute accuracy about the weather are wrong. Most cannot even tell you more than 50% of the time what the current weather is, let alone what it will be in an hour, or the next day. However the best weather sources currently are Dark Sky or Foreca (although these will still get the current weather wrong about a third of the time), both of whom can be accessed through the Carrot weather app. Foreca also have their own app, which is free. One other app that I know of, Hello Weather, also allows you to choose Dark Sky as a source for pulling weather data, at least until 31 March 2023.
Hope that is helpful!
When Apple shut down the Dark Sky app I had read that the Carrot Weather app provides an option to set an interface that is almost identical to the Dark Sky app and it gives users a free 7 day trial of their ‘ultra premium’ offering, which allows unlimited switching between seven different weather data providers. One of these providers is still Dark Sky, as they are still providing weather data to apps until 31 March 2023, even though Apple has removed the specific Dark Sky app itself.
So Carrot sounded good – but what about the accuracy? Before jumping in and signing up to a subscription to the app I tested each of the seven sources, by checking the current and next hour weather at my location and seeing if the source was accurate various times each day over a period of 4 days. What I found was actually quite surprising.
For my location in Scotland, of the seven sources, the Dark Sky source was the most accurate – accurately predicting the current and next hour’s weather 67% of the time. The next most accurate was Foreca, who got it right 62% of the time. The two least accurate were Aeris with 33% accuracy, and Apple with 38% accuracy. Considering that Apple has integrated the Dark Sky technology into their weather it looks like they have done a bad job since they are less accurate that Dark Sky by some considerable way.
I also checked each evening to see the forecast for the next morning – on each day every single source got the weather forecast wrong, including failing to forecast some very heavy snow that fell during rush hour.
So my conclusion? If you live in Scotland, or I imagine anywhere else hilly, mountainous, or near an ocean – somewhere with changeable weather (i.e most of the UK, Ireland, and the Nordic Countries) then an app’s claims to have minute to minute accuracy about the weather are wrong. Most cannot even tell you more than 50% of the time what the current weather is, let alone what it will be in an hour, or the next day. However the best weather sources currently are Dark Sky or Foreca (although these will still get the current weather wrong about a third of the time), both of whom can be accessed through the Carrot weather app. Foreca also have their own app, which is free. One other app that I know of, Hello Weather, also allows you to choose Dark Sky as a source for pulling weather data, at least until 31 March 2023.
Hope that is helpful!
This just in:
Weather forecasting is not an exact science, and everyone having tiny computers in their pockets has not changed that.
“You want the weather? Open a window”
Weather forecasting is not an exact science, and everyone having tiny computers in their pockets has not changed that.
“You want the weather? Open a window”
It's strange that Apple Weather and Dark Sky would give different results, since the back-end interface (the API for weather apps to use) is almost exactly the same thing. I built my own weather station, years ago, and it uses data from Dark Sky's API to provide/display forecast info. When the purchase was announced, I dreaded having to write new code for some other API (writing code to read data is easy enough, but I'd have to come up with equivalents for every field I was pulling from Dark Sky, probably with some translation along the way), but then I found that Apple Weather is using (nearly) the exact same API, you just need to sign up for a different API key (requires an Apple Developer membership, which I have), and make requests from a different URL, but you get data back in the same JSON structure, meaning that weather apps that previously used Dark Sky's API (there are quite a lot out there), could switch over to Apple Weather with a minimum of effort.
If they've changed the way the forecasts are calculated, on the back-end, it might possibly be because of different contracts with various other providers (Dark Sky aggregated information from numerous sources and then sprinkled some of their own magic fairy dust on it - Apple would still have the magic fairy dust, but may have changed the list of sources used somehow).
Yeah, I get different forecasts when switching between Dark Sky and Apple Weather in Carrot here in Florida as well. I definitely found that odd.
Sorry if I already posted this at some point, but I find this site useful in determining what may be the most accurate source for my particular area. I think it's U.S. only though.
Weather Forecast and Weather Forecast Accuracy for Your City (forecastadvisor.com)
Sorry if I already posted this at some point, but I find this site useful in determining what may be the most accurate source for my particular area. I think it's U.S. only though.
Weather Forecast and Weather Forecast Accuracy for Your City (forecastadvisor.com)
I installed Carrot recently and paid for an annual premium subscription. I love the UI since it looks just like Dark Sky however the weather forecast info doesn't seem as reliable, even when using Dark Sky as the source. There were several days last week where Carrot indicated it was snowing my area, and although we do in fact get a lot of snow in my area (I live in the midwest), there wasn't a trace of precipitation outside.
They told us thirty years ago that it was because there was limited. But thirty more years, and they're not even close?
They’re probably getting farther off, because climate change has caused upheaval in the traditional weather patterns.
This means the weather models give a wider range of possibilities.
I mean - 30 years ago there was not a weather model that existed which would predict a summer where it hits 119 degrees in Portland Oregon for several days in a row and a winter time where Alaska was warmer than Texas for a week.
They're probably getting further off because humans writing more complicated algorithms for prediction have gotten more complicated for a simple guess anyway.
The real forecast advancements in the last 30 years have been in shorter time predictions, hurricane, tornado and the likes. That the have been able to predict earlier the extreme Mother Nature. The is it going to drizzle 5 days from now is still a crap shoot.