Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Dark Sky Removed From iOS App Store Ahead of Upcoming Shutdown
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Unlike most other weather apps, they developed a fairly sophisticated back-end system, that takes in data from a bunch of sources and combines it together.
And they have an API (the Dark Sky API) that offers a RESTful HTTPS interface to the data - it's very easy to make a query by sending it a specially constructed URL and get back well-structured JSON that gives all sorts of useful weather and forecast data for the specified location.
Turns out a lot of other weather apps were written that make use of this API, because it makes things terribly easy - you put all your effort into writing the pretty "front end" of the app, for displaying data, and make one call to their web server (periodically), to get all the data to display.
They also have a very nice front-end app ("Dark Sky" on the App Store, up until, today, apparently), that displays the information in a nice format. One of its highlights, though, is it's very good at working out rain, in a form like, "possible light rain, starting in 5 minutes, and ending 20 minutes later" - and you can have the Dark Sky app send this information as push notifications. It can be quite useful to find out it's likely to start raining half an hour from now, or whatever.
I have a home weather station I constructed that taps into the Dark Sky API for forecast information for my location - it queries Dark Sky's webserver every five minutes to get updated forecast information (and has been, 24/7, since 2016). I expected that I was going to have to switch to some competing service; there are a few such services - some charge, while some don't, if you make fewer than X queries a day/month/etc. (Dark Sky has always had a "free tier" like this), but this was going to involve adapting my software to an almost certainly considerably different data stream (fields that simply differ in name are not difficult to handle, but fields that work differently cause more of a headache - for instance, Dark Sky will send an array of structures describing the likelihood and intensity of rain for each minute for the next hour, while some other service may present similar information in an entirely different format, say, a number for how many minutes until the next time it might rain).
Upon hearing that Apple would have a WeatherKit API, I'd even considered the possibility of having a Mac mini running a Swift program (something I'd write) that reads data from WeatherKit and uses it to construct JSON data similar to the Dark Sky data, to feed into my system, rather than hacking up the system to use a different service. I'd been putting off a decision on this for a while.
But! But, I found out a little while back that Apple is more or less, just rebranding the existing Dark Sky web-based API (I'll have to register to get the proper keys to use it, but that's quite straightforward). But it's basically the same data in nearly the same format, but will now be coming from an Apple webserver rather than from the Dark Sky webserver. I'll be able to adapt my system to use it in perhaps a weekend. It's funny how closely they copied the ruleset for using the API, too - I actually have, on my weather station's main screen (a Raspberry Pi 7" touchscreen display, which has been running in my living room near continuously since 2016), a tiny graphic in the corner that has a logo and says, "Powered by Dark Sky", which is one of the conditions required for using their data (the logo/text, in one of several different formats, needs to appear in your app, like in a help screen - since my weather station only has one display, it's on the main display). Switching to WeatherKit, I'm going to end up replacing that graphic with one that says something like, "Powered by 🍎Weather". Personally, I'll find it amusing to have an Apple logo on the screen of my own weather station.
So, to answer your second question, "I bet it draws data from the exact same monitors as other weather apps", well, yes and no - it uses a lot of sources that are available to other apps, but quite the opposite, it not only synthesizes the data from multiple sources together, but it also provides that data to a lot of those other weather apps. And since Apple is supporting a web-based API, and not just, say, a Swift framework in iOS/macOS, a lot of other weather apps will still continue to use this data, and you could easily have, say, an Android app that uses the data, without any problem (they charge at various rates if you make over a certain number of API calls per day, but where Dark Sky's "free" tier was something like a couple thousand calls a day - intended use being for developing an app - WeatherKit's "free" tier covers, I think, half a million calls a day - sort of ends up being another really nice benefit of paying for an Apple Developer membership, along with programmatic access to iCloud storage space space for your app's shared data and such).
A lot of the good bits of the Dark Sky app have moved into Apple's updated Weather app that's included in iOS 16 (and soon to be in iPadOS). It's not the Dark Sky app of old, but neither is it the Apple Weather app of old. Best of both worlds? Not sure yet.
For what it's worth, this is a screenshot from my system, which has been running in my living room for six years (the righthand column is a touchscreen control for the living room's Hue lights with specific scenes, but these days I normally just ask Siri to set scenes):
Last edited:
Maybe hold out hope they will revamp Weather around it.
I never used Dark Sky so I’m loving the changes to iOS Weather but I’m sure those that knew it, know better.
Well at least they'll replace it with some junk that "we think you're really gonna love." ... So we got that goin for us...
Dark sky was and is my favorite weather app. So precise. Alerts on point. Sucks it will be gone.
I'm not really sure about all these people saying the weather app is now just as good. For whatever reason, the radar for Dark Sky and the iOS weather app still don't match up for me. I thought they were supposed to be using the same information. (Dark Sky is typically more accurate.)
Last edited:
The thing is, it didn't, exactly. A lot of the tech from Dark Sky went into Apple's newest version of their Weather app, but it's not quite the same.
There are a lot of weather apps in the AppStore and some of them can be hard to distinguish from the Apple one. Make sure you see Apple as the publisher.
I do see the Apple Weather app with 2.8 our of 5 stars. Until now that was a very limited app that only gave very basic weather information. Most of those ratings will be from that old version of the app. The new version is much more full featured and uses the Dark Sky data. I would expect more recent ratings to start reflecting that improvement.
There are like a thousand to choose from. PCalc is a good starting place, if you don't have another preference. It's also been around (continuously improved) since ... 1992?
I get people wanting an official calculator app that has been anointed by Apple, but they don't seem interested (I seem to recall an interview once where it came up and their response was, "no, we wouldn't just scale up the iPhone app, if we made an iPad calculator, it'd have to be something really special"). What I don't get is the continuing wailing and gnashing of teeth (from some, not from you) when this comes up - it's not like an iPad is incapable of running any of a thousand calculator apps, and it's not like Apple's calculator app on iOS is all that special, and it's not like someone who can afford $500-$1000 for an iPad can't afford $5 for an app. Like, really? Is this the hill you want to die on? Just pick an app (again, PCalc is a great choice if you don't want to research on your own), and move onto something else.
I will miss the awesomely specific notification sound. It immediately triggers my umbrella reflexes.
The iOS Weather app is vastly improved these days, but it certainly doesn't have the sense of fun that Dark Sky had.
The point is apple bought darksky to use its data for their own weather app. Things you liked about darksky are now in the weather app "rain notifications ect". They did this to take a great app away from the greenies. Now I have one less app on my phone.
You've now made 3 of your total of 7 MacRumors comments so far, asserting, or alluding to, Apple charging $10/mo for their Weather app, including wanting to start a petition to fight against this - please either cite a source for this rumor, or stop repeating it.
What are you even talking about? I suspect you installed some random-ass weather app that charges $10 a month to remove the ads, and you somehow believe this is the weather app Apple includes with iOS -- and now you feel compelled to post this insane misinformation repeatedly.
Does it let you look arbitrarily far into the past and future like Dark Sky does?
Sometimes I want to look back on what the temperature was months or years ago, or at about what it'll be months from now (IE, when trying to decide what month to take a trip somewhere.)
No. I used to go to the weather underground site for that information, though I haven’t done that in a couple of year.
I feel exactly the same way Bout Aperture! just woke up one morning and decided not to support it no more, and stopped updating the Camera RAW Profiles so Aperture wouldn't see RAW Files from newer Camera's.
The Hourly Forecast pane shows precipitation probability if it's non-zero.
Ah, that could be what they mean - the number of calls a developer can make per month (across all copies of the app), before they have to pay anything, is half a million API calls. Above that and the developer will have to pay something.
Ah, quoting Apple's developer documentation, the pricing is:
- 500,000 calls/month: Included with membership
- 1 million calls/month: US$49.99
- 2 million calls/month: US$99.99
- 5 million calls/month: US$249.99
- 10 million calls/month: US$499.99
- 20 million calls/month: US$999.99
Sad. My first paid App. Thanks for the everything!
Last edited:
Sad to see it removed. Hopefully Apple fully incorporates all the features in it's weather app.
Or clone Dark Sky's design, but using Apple's new API, and put the source code on GitHub for everybody who is or knows a developer to use for free.