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Apple Shuts Down Popular Weather App 'Dark Sky'

JM said:
The best underrated feature of dark sky was the API that other weather app developers could use for their novel ideas.

I think the same thing happened with Weather Underground when they were purchased by The Weather Channel (yahoo weather used weather underground data, and the. Became terrible prediction after TWC bought them.)
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IBM bought the digital part, which includes the weather channel app and weather underground app. That’s the reason The Weather Channel’s new streaming service isn’t available as an iphone or Apple TV app. This particularly sucks because IBM is charging more for a subscription to their “the weather channel” app than the real Weather Channel network is charging for a subscription to their streaming service.

I bought a Roku just to use The Weather Channel’s steaming app, which the weather channel streaming app works fine on, but the Roku experience is just not on the level of the Apple TV. I hope The real Weather Channel and IBM work something out soon.
 
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Shirasaki said:
And people defends apple for no end?
Honestly, the lack of law regulating big tech company purchasing smaller companies is killing more and more amazing stuff as we enter 2023.
dark sky is just one of the many victims of such “buy and throw” megacorp competitor elimination spree.
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I absolutely see your point and I agree, but at least apple paid them. Google just straight up stole Sonos technology and thought they’d beat them down by draining them dry financially in court. They wouldn’t even pay a licensing fee when Sonos won. They’re still filing stupid lawsuits against Sonos because they didn’t get their way this time. I don’t even want to think about what would have happened if google had somehow purchased Sonos. I know what would have happened, the same thing Google always does. End of rant.
 
Number 41 said:
DarkSky was fantastic and gave you all the information you needed to know with one click (no scrolling, clicking through submenus, etc.).

The current Apple Weather is exponentially less intuitive and buries important info behind extra buttons.
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Agreed! DarkSky's display showed expected precipitation by hour, as well as forecast temperature by hour, with the temperatures along a curve to intuitively show increases and decreases, all in a single display on launch. Getting to expected precipitation by hour on the Apple Weather app takes at least three clicks.
 
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ipedro said:
This isn’t going to be popular with the people replying to this thread but the truth of the matter is that Apple didn’t just acquire the Dark Sky technology, they hired their team.

The folks who designed Dark Sky had an opportunity to redesign their app to fit beyond a niche. The iOS 16 Weather app was built by the Dark Sky team. Give it a chance. I have and it’s really damn good.
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But it's not good. It's needlessly convoluted, favoring eye-candy over useful information. It might be the same team, but they clearly weren't given carte blanche to use whatever UI they saw fit. The new Weather app screams "dumbed-down Apple UI". As I wrote in another comment, almost everything requires at least one extra tap than Dark Sky. Dark Sky's vertical hourly list was extremely intuitive. Scrubbing your finger across a graph is just stupid.
 
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Pilot Jones said:
Apple absorbing the very best of the best and still keeping their native solution mediocre is a crying shame. I know it’s just a weather app at the end of the day, but this is pretty horrible showing from Tim and co.

They should’ve just taken Dark Sky and rebranded it as Apple Weather with zero changes. That would’ve been an infinitely better solution to whatever the hell is going on right now.
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I agree with everything you said, especially with the last part. I really liked Dark Sky. Apple's Weather was okay, but Dark Sky was much better. I feel cheated. I downloaded The Weather Channel app, and I liked it even less. Chock this up to another small cut in life that added into all the rest makes you lose a lot of blood.

I do not understand why they did this at all much less why they did it this way.
 
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Check out the reports that just came out that show that Dark Sky was a scam. It never actually gave any real weather information. It just made cool shapes from a weather patten, and then guessed where it was going to go. The weather service was highly critical of the app for not actually giving any real information that is useful for knowing what is coming. I'm as shocked as everybody else.

It sure was pretty.
 
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Marbles1 said:
A great shame if it truly stops working tomorrow.

My favourite weather app, with the cleanest and easiest to read interface.

Perfect for any rainy country.
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Agreed. Apple's Weather is too dark and just too...how should I say it....uninviting? I really hesitate to open it at all. I do not find it very accurate either.

What was the big payoff to Apple for buying Dark Sky and killing it? I do not understand it. I only found Dark Sky maybe a year and a half ago. I was very pleased with it, and now it is gone. I deleted it from my mobile. I guess that was the right thing to do. I do not use many apps. Personally, I do not like them, but I liked Dark Sky. I paid $4 for it I think, so $4 thrown away on top of losing a really good app. :mad:
 
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ipedro said:
This isn’t going to be popular with the people replying to this thread but the truth of the matter is that Apple didn’t just acquire the Dark Sky technology, they hired their team.

The folks who designed Dark Sky had an opportunity to redesign their app to fit beyond a niche. The iOS 16 Weather app was built by the Dark Sky team. Give it a chance. I have and it’s really damn good.
Click to expand...

So why is it now thoroughly unreliable compared to the old Dark Sky app? I used to get alerts for rain and it was fairly accurate. Not sure if the Apple app even allows this, but the hourly forecast is often wrong. I’ve given it a chance for months now.
 
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So Carrot weather + using Dark Sky as a source (whilst the api remains available for the next 3 months) + using a publicly available nearby tempest or netatmo weather station seems to work well for me.

Gives me rain notifications when as I've expected.

Not sure what to do when apple switches off the Dark Sky API though.
 
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ipedro said:
This isn’t going to be popular with the people replying to this thread but the truth of the matter is that Apple didn’t just acquire the Dark Sky technology, they hired their team.

The folks who designed Dark Sky had an opportunity to redesign their app to fit beyond a niche. The iOS 16 Weather app was built by the Dark Sky team. Give it a chance. I have and it’s really damn good.
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Wow, is that so that they hired Dark Sky's team and that team is the one who built the current native iOS Weather app?

To me, the buggiest thing about the Weather app right now is the missing advisories, warnings, and watches issued by the meteorology services. That is a pretty glaring miss and requires me to navigate to another weather app just to see those notices. SMH.

By the way, if you have any article links pointing to Apple hiring Dark Sky's team, etc., I'm curious to read up on that.
 
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leicaman said:
Check out the reports that just came out that show that Dark Sky was a scam. It never actually gave any real weather information. It just made cool shapes from a weather patten, and then guessed where it was going to go. The weather service was highly critical of the app for not actually giving any real information that is useful for knowing what is coming. I'm as shocked as everybody else.

It sure was pretty.
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Please post some links for us to peruse. Thanks!

I'll say that in the "earlier years", Dark Sky was pretty accurate for me. I can't pinpoint what year's we're talking about though. But, in the later years, Dark Sky was noticeably less accurate than my previous experiences. That caught my attention because I had not moved home-base locations, didn't even move homes! I distinctly remember going from relying only on Dark Sky for hyperlocal forecasts to checking other weather apps for their predictions.
 
leicaman said:
Check out the reports that just came out that show that Dark Sky was a scam. It never actually gave any real weather information. It just made cool shapes from a weather patten, and then guessed where it was going to go. The weather service was highly critical of the app for not actually giving any real information that is useful for knowing what is coming. I'm as shocked as everybody else.

It sure was pretty.
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Sarcasm? Can't tell if you're being serious.
 
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Blaine said:
Apple should have kept the sound 😤
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Do what I did: Go to https://www.apple.com/feedback/weather/ and give Apple your feedback about the app! In case of notifications, I left them this feedback:

Being a longtime Dark Sky user, I miss having the sounds that it made when alerting me for rain, etc. I would like to have at least Dark Sky’s rain alert sound restored as a) it’s not generic like it is now for Weather, where it’s hard to distinguish between, say, a new voicemail or other app’s notification that shares the same sound and b) I simply like it better and grew fond of it over the years and miss hearing it since it was instantly recognizable as no other app had anything similar to that sound for notifications! At the very least, at least give us the option to change the sound, especially since it’s for rain and related weather conditions, which can be even potentially life-saving, especially for those who live in more extreme weather environments. Thanks for your consideration!

Which then leads to this screen:

1672762307041.png


Basically, if you want to make Apple Weather as Dark Sky-like as possible, you gotta let them know what needs improvement!
 
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ipedro said:
This isn’t going to be popular with the people replying to this thread but the truth of the matter is that Apple didn’t just acquire the Dark Sky technology, they hired their team.

The folks who designed Dark Sky had an opportunity to redesign their app to fit beyond a niche. The iOS 16 Weather app was built by the Dark Sky team. Give it a chance. I have and it’s really damn good.
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I would love to read your source(s) as, even though I know that Apple acquired Dark Sky, I never heard THIS before! I hope it’s true as I used Dark Sky for MANY years and want to have as much of it as possible in Apple’s app…
 
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