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Comment by mrrsm | Hacker News Reader

> Our goal has always been to provide the world with the best weather information possible, to help as many people as we can stay dry and safe, and to do so in a way that respects your privacy.

I don't understand how being acquired by Apple helps further that goal. Removing support for non-Apple devices seems to drastically lower the number of people who you are helping.

I am interested in seeing what happens to this service moving forward as it sounds like the API may be closed off completely by 2021 as well.

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> I don't understand how being acquired by Apple helps further that goal. Removing support for non-Apple devices seems to drastically lower the number of people who you are helping.

I would imagine that DarkSky will become the basis for the default weather apps in iOS and macOS, and the number of people who use those defaults is drastically higher than the number of people who use DarkSky iOS/Android as a third-party app. The total addressable market shrinks, but the functional number of users increases.

That thoroughly misses the point. They could do both. There is zero reason to shrink the addressable market other than Apple not wanting to play with others.

We may not agree (and I don't agree with Apple's move here) but it's hardly surprising that they would shut it down for their direct competitor platform.

Let's not forget that it is/was a paid subscription on Android, so offering it for free on iOS and keeping paid on Android would still give them a significant edge. Somebody else in this thread mentioned that Shazam is still available on Android even after the acquisition, so it's definitely not as obvious as you suggest.

Correct, and Apple Music and Apple TV are available on all platforms too. But both bring tens of millions of paid subscribers.

While I don't know what Dark Sky's paid base is, it's probably way smaller than that.

Not only that, but presumably if Dark Sky becomes the base for the iOS default Weather app, then there won't be a DS standalone iOS app. So they wouldn't just be maintaining a port, it would be an entire Android app with no iOS equivalent.

I mean, they could just simply release it as a new Apple Weather app on Android. Just like they did with Apple Music.

I mean this is basically it. Its effectively a hostile takeover of one segment of the app market.

They could have just bought the developers to work on Product X at Apple and don't want them wasting their time on something else. That's how a lot of Tech M&A is done...

But then how will the original creators get rich?

Its very hard to maintain an Android app to the same quality that people expect from Apple. I can see why they'd want to shrink that headcount or redirect to a more productive endeavor. As a bonus, Apple devices get a better weather app than the competition. The API part doesn't make as much sense, since they could make a pretty penny reselling that data without as much support burden.

apple has 100 billion dollars in the bank, funding a world-class android team should be possible if not desirable for them as they transform more and more in to a services company

It's not about money, or else Google's YouTube app wouldn't be a massive pile of failure on iOS, tvOS, etc. It's about being able to manage teams and maintain direction.

It's not about money. It's about focus.

It's tempting to think you can just throw money at something and make it work. Unfortunately that's not how you build something great.

thanks for writing the exact same thing as the person next to you, but im not talking about "just throwing money", i'm talking about what they do when their ever-increasing war-chest stops increasing and they actually have to build things for people who can't afford their ever more expensive hardware. If apple thinks that they can continue running their ecosystem this way, i'm gonna be cackling in a few years.

See, hurting existing users is fine! They're only a small part of the addressable market!

From the perspective of "We want to help as many users as possible," this is correct.

That's a very good point. The number of people they are helping will drastically increase if that integration happens. It's unfortunate that the direct users who aren't on Apple's platforms can't continue to use it anymore.

> I don't understand how being acquired by Apple helps further that goal.

It doesn't. I will found a company just to have it acquired, so my press release can be:

> We had to choose between making shitloads of money, enough to not care about anything ever again, or let you continue seeing slightly more accurate weather. Guess what we chose, sucker! Thanks for giving us money, see you never.

As a user, I would actually be far less offended by such an honest statement. I find it difficult to blame people for wanting money, and trivial to demonize them for lying about it.

Yeah, exactly. I would appreciate them saying "we know this sucks, but it was a shitload of money, what would you do?".

> I find it difficult to blame people for wanting money

This is not a universal constant, but it is something that unfettered capitalism idealizes.

https://aerisweather.com - great API, functional, affordable, great customer service and documentation

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