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Comment by kyledrake | Hacker News Reader

> Android and Wear OS App

> The app will no longer be available for download. Service to existing users and subscribers will continue until July 1, 2020, at which point the app will be shut down. Subscribers who are still active at that time will receive a refund.

IBM bought the Weather Underground app and ruined it, and now Dark Sky was bought by Apple and they're ruining that too. Now I will have zero good weather apps for Android. Just so Apple can flex on Google, even though I was a paying customer for both. During a major pandemic when public services are heavily reduced and poor access to good weather apps could put people in danger.

Extremely disgusting and extremely horrible. Always feels great to know that my reward for supporting startups is to be cannon fodder to rounding errors at major corporations.

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I cannot begin to say how much IBM ruined Weather Underground. The app was _perfect_! I was thrilled to pay for it.

Now it's probably the worst app on my phone and I should just delete it. It takes forever to start, more than half the time it loads no data, and even if it is loaded the UI redesign has made the whole thing slow and useless.

Would love suggestions for another app on Android.

Totally agree. I find I have to load it, close and reopen the app about 95% of the time. Hugely bummed these two apps are going into the wastebin. Certainly leaves a huge void for us Android users.

I've been using this one since underground stopped being useful.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.samruston....

Sadly at some point they weren't able to pay for the dark sky API anymore and since then the quality of forecasts is a bit less convincing. I'm still rather shocked by the low reviews though, for me it works well and I love that you can add a dozen cities and see the forecast.

That app also changed ownership a couple years ago - it's still functional, but I don't think can be downloaded if you don't already have it.

Just a heads-up, that link is broken.

No it's not. It's only available if you bought it before it changed hands and providers, as I did.

Supposedly they're still fixing bugs from the new weather provider before it's made public, but it hasn't been updated in ten months. I doubt it will be improved anymore, and I don't really use it much since the new provider is mediocre at best.

Restating a comment from about a year ago[0]:

If you are in the United States, nothing beats getting the forecast straight from the horses mouth (NWS that is). Some companies are notorious for producing 30+ day forecasts, which can't have any meaningful levels of skill.

NOAA/NWS should just create their own mobile application. I use Wx[1], which parses NWS data directly and can be found on f-droid[2] and g---le play.

Granted, Wx doesn't follow Material Design for Android in the slightest, but I like it that way because it's very information-dense, snappy, and light (unlike r--ct "native" and other JS toolkits out there).

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19775291

[1]: https://gitlab.com/joshua.tee/wx

[2]: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/joshuatee.wx/

Why do you feel the need to censor the words Google and React?

"If you are in a densely-populated area of the United States..."

Your blanket statement doesn't always hold. This is more accurate.

I'm not sure, NWS does a good job of interpolating for regions without a weather station, even taking into account coastal effects and elevation. In my experience (in a rural, montane environment) it works pretty well if you specify your coordinates, not just the zipcode.

Have there any been any comparisons of the commercial services to NWS? That would be an interesting casual study.

Edit: There are some additional interesting comments downthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22740480

I'm not sure

I am. Spend some time in the desert southwest, particularly on indian reservations. You'll find that NWS temperatures are regularly off by 10-20°. But that's still better than Weather Underground, which can be off by as much as 50°.

One thing I will give the NWS credit for is the wind forecasts. Those things are spot-on at least 90% of the time.

I've lived in 15 cities in a dozen states, and what I've noticed is that if you're in a large city, or east of a large city, the forecasts are great.

But if you're west of a large city, or in a smaller city, it's hit-or-miss. This makes sense, as the better forecasters tend to end up in the larger markets.

I see. That's interesting, you may want to send those comments to your regional forecast office. They have several citizen-science programs like SKYWARN and their ham radio observers, that help them improve their regional forecasts.

Opposite experience here. Services like Dark Sky and Wunderground are so inaccurate up here in Alaska that it's dangerous. NWS is also often pretty wrong but way less wrong than anything else. Interesting to hear your

Larger cities are built on plains because they are more accessible. Easier to forecast without crazy mountains in the way.

No. Almost every medium and large city in the United States was built because of its access to water and shipping. New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Houston, PORTland, Boston, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Charleston, and on and on and on.

Even smaller cities like Minneapolis, Buffalo, Sioux Falls, Albany, and hundreds more are located where they are because waterfalls and rapids made them the farthest extent of water travel before rapids or waterfalls or other hazards made the route too difficult.

You might be interested to know that private sector weather forecasting firms have a long history of lobbying to prevent NOAA/NWS from building its own end user services and apps [0].

I agree that NWS [text] forecasts are usually the best, though it can be time consuming to digest them. Nate Silver's book [1] makes the interesting point that commercial forecasts almost always reduce the quality of the input data they're given from NOAA, but that part of this boils down to incentives: Nobody complains if you forecast a small chance of rain and it turns out to be sunny. The problem spot is in ruining someone's picnic. Hence, forecasts tend to bias heavily towards rain.

[0]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-06-14/trump-s-p...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Signal_and_the_Noise

Use the native Android weather app hidden in the widgets.

I really like Windy

The reviews for the app are pretty amazing. It went from one of the highest rated weather apps to 2.5 stars in a matter of days: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.wundergrou...

I use Geometric Weather [1].

It's beautifully designed, has an excellent selection of widgets, and is open source.

You can even set your lock screen to be a live wallpaper of the current weather.

[1] https://github.com/WangDaYeeeeee/GeometricWeather/

I agree. I haven't found anything that compares to the old Weather Underground app's plot of weather data. It was such a brilliant way to convey so much data quickly and clearly.

After finding no substitutes, I started making my own weather app (for my own private use) this week to duplicate that functionality. But of course I was using the Dark Sky API which will now get shut down. I just can't win this one!

I would gladly pay money for a weather app that was nothing but their line graph. It was so simple and clean. I often took screenshots and shared with friends. The new version is useless, but I cannot find a replacement.

You can try Yr: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=no.nrk.yr&hl=e... It is an app made by the Norwegian Meteorological Institute afaik and works quite well all over the world. I'm curious on how well it works where you live! They have open API's as well: https://api.met.no

I am not seeing a live radar view

I think that only works in Norway where they have radar data from all the weather stations, or however that works.

Hey, truly thanks for this. It's not Dark Sky, but it's not bad, and I never would've heard about it were it not for folks on HN. I'm getting good data for where I live, the UI is nice and clean. It's a start!

I came here to say this. No tracking, it's a public service and the UI is great. Thanks to the Norwegian Metereological Institute for making this available to everyone.

I really think this shows how direly we need "public interest" services on our phone.

Thank you, this looks really good.

Another great option is Klara - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.androworks...

Great information density, clean interface and has by the far the best widget of any weather app I've seen. It manages to display so much information with graphs without being visually overloaded.

just tried this and its graph-centric UI is exactly the thing I loved for years about Wunderground before it went dramatically downhill.

But please, let's not tell anyone else about this - I am tired of my favorite apps always getting ruined.

Know of any apps like this that are available for iOS? I loved the old wunderground app's graphs and have been trying to find a replacement for ages...

I was going to suggest Yr as well! I live in France and it seems to work reasonably well.

It's literally bonkers to me how many people sell out. Is the VLC guy the only person with some integrity? Can we not be satisfied with the money we make from subscribers instead of selling everything including the kitchen sink to some corporate behemoth to swallow it up and kill every open service?

The same thing is happening in the podcasting ecosystem right now. it's turning more and more into a walled garden.

I used to think the same thing, but what about the situations where people don't sell out and just see their features copied by the corporate behemoth, wholesale? That scenario seems to play out often as well (g---le+ and diaspora always come to mind).

I suppose if the goal is to just see some technology or technique or idea become more broadly adopted, this isn't a bad thing. But what about poor-implementations of a good concept (UI/UX bloat, user-hostile business models, etc.) Honestly, I'm not sure. Is this analogous to the trends that drive consolidation of firms in general?

I guess this is a round-about say of saying that selling-out is probably the most rational thing to do, but please prove me wrong.

> g---le+

What is the purpose behind "censoring" Google's name here...?

It's an attempt to hide from the scripts that notify people or teams when some company is being mentioned. It's helpful in some environments.

Large amounts of money offer much more tangible freedom than a moral victory, and can lead to many more moral victories down the line.

Alternatively, people just like money.

I'd much rather take whatever large amount of cash to basically ensure my needs and those of my future offsprings are taken care of for a very long time, if not for life.

I really take VLC for granted, now you've pointed this out!

I haven’t had that many conversations with founders, but I’ve had a few, and I suspect that like a lot of thing there’s a fiction that the hopeful believe and the entrenched have absolutely no incentive to correct. Not as bad as record labels for new bands, but not a whole lot better.

That fiction, if I have it right, is that selling your company is a merger. That you are a lesser peer and that you will still have a great deal of influence in the resulting company. And there are people who manage that, but most do not. And not only that, your payout is delayed and contingent on you keeping your former employees from getting too surly. Sometimes for several years.

And since your story was supposed to be about how much you sacrificed and how hard you worked to sell your company and became successful, are you really going to be frank and honest with yourself and those who ask, or are you going put on a brave face?

I wonder how many of the “money doesn’t buy happiness” nouveau-riche mean something like the problems listed above when they say that. “I reached my goal and it wasn’t what I wanted.”

Every man has his price...

It's bonkers how bad all the weather apps are for Android.

I use Yr weather (from the Norwegian Broadcasting Institute and Meteorological Institute) which is... fine, but their source of data isn't great for my location.

Almost everything else I've tried is some combination of slow, poorly designed, or not-privacy-respecting, even if I'm willing to pay.

I felt a little slighted (in a cheeky way) by the "zero good weather apps for Android" comment. Started writing then decided against it. Then I got this email in my inbox from a user :-)

Dark Sky is shuttering their Android app after being acquired by Apple. People are saying things like "Now I will have zero good weather apps for Android. "

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22740331

Flowx is better than Dark Sky!

I used to drive a convertible. I liked Dark Sky because I would get a warning notification if it was going to rain right were I was and I could go put the top up.

I haven't been able to find this type of notification in Flowx. Am I missing this, or by chance is it cmoing?

No, there are no notification. I plan to add a notification editor one day where you can configure any notification you want.

That said, the to-do list is super long so it might be a while before this feature is done. I depends on demand.

That said, Rainviewer is working on predicting rain from radar images for up to 2 hours ahead. Check them out and ask when this feature might appear. They might have beta testing and your situation sounds like a good test case.

Thanks for the update

I like the UI, and I'll commit for now, but the end game for the constant churn of useful weather apps is an open source app that can't be sold. Someday someone will offer you X dollars and you'd be a fool not to accept and us users will be doing this rodeo all over. Just remember us when your partying on your p-diddy yacht.

This was like the one Android app I paid for. Ugh. Also super annoyed.

You are exactly the reason why companies like Dark Sky can be bought by Apple: you have only ever paid for one Android app. That does not make a vibrant app economy.

Another thing would help a more vibrant app economy would be if more teams made high-quality apps that I want that I can pay a few dollars a year in exchange for no advertisements or tracking.

"IBM bought the Weather Underground app and ruined it ..."

I never used the WU app, but I do use the WU website regularly and feel that it is very slow and spammy and bad UI, etc., etc.

The problem is, I cannot find anyone else to give me a 10 day forecast.

How can I tease out a 10-day forecast from weather.gov ?

My understanding is that 10 day forecasts just aren’t accurate enough to really mean anything, so most weather sources don’t publish them.

NWS doesn't do regular daily/hourly forecasts beyond a week, but they do publish "extended range outlooks" which provide probabilities for precipitation and temperature in the 6-10 day and 8-14 day range. Pretty low-res in both temporal and geographical resolution, though, due to the uncertainties: https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/forecasts/extended_ra...

You could also use the NOAA's global weather simulations, some of which go out to 16 days: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/model-data/model-datas...

Just came here to say "fuck". I'm so let down. Can't have nice things, I guess.

I was about to do the same. Frankly, I'm pissed.

My dad owns a base station that uploads data to WU and since the takeover I've not been able to get a proper API key to have him pull his own data from the WU API.

Luckily the base station is easy to scrape for the raw data locally, but still.

It's especially frustrating when two paragraphs above they said this:

> There is no better place to accomplish these goals than at Apple. We’re thrilled to have the opportunity to reach far more people, with far more impact, than we ever could alone.

So how exactly does cutting off literally billions of potential users allow them to "reach far more people"?

I've been using Overdrop [0] for a few months now. Has great widgets and can select from a few different sources for the weather data too.

[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=widget.dd.com....

it says "powered by dark sky", so since they are shutting down the api, wont this app likely stop working soon?

It has always provided the option to select between Dark Sky, Weather Bit or AccuWeather. So while Dark Sky may go away, at least there are two other options, and hopefully they'll add others in light of this news.

I didn't realize that IBM bought WU. Explains why I saw the quality tank... I wondered what was up. I ended up deleting it.

Try Carrot on iOS. It is really good. It is famous for its mini game and snarky robot comments that predict the weather. But the core weather is great and has the best interface.

Just two FYIs: it uses Dark Sky's API and it's also available on Android.

Carrot, by default, uses the Dark Sky API. It's one of the few apps that lets you choose an alternate data source. Wunderground used to be the best choice, but that API vanished last year. With Dark Sky gone, none of the remaining options are particularly good, if you live in the USA.

Try Hello Weather - https://helloweatherapp.com/!

Also powered by Dark Sky.

They're not ruining it, they're just not making their product available on a competitor device

Which ruins it for a large portion of the userbase. Do you have a good product if it only runs on a Nokia NGage? It's a grey area

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