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Comment by robszumski | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure what happened but Dark Sky went from awesome to awful in recent months after the Apple acquisition. Is it just me? Going from "no rain all day" to actively raining with a huge storm 2 hours later. The app does update with this info, but very close to the actual storm.

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As an Android user, it used to be a fun party trick at the bar, to show everyone the alert on my phone from dark sky that it was going to start raining in X minutes or that it was going to stop raining in Y minutes and then everyone checking later and it being basically down to the second accurate.

As a former paid user of Dark Sky that lost that information when Apple bought them I feel no sympathy for iOS users that Dark Sky has gone to crap

I am sad such an amazing tool for the world was destroyed by a corporation trying to deprive another corporation so they could maybe make a little more money.

The integration of dark sky was definitely rocky but apple is running dark sky as a data api now, this android app is apparently using it as it’s weather data source now:

https://www.boondogglelabs.com/projects/forecaster.html

The Dark Sky API is getting shut down in a few months: https://blog.darksky.net/

I too have noticed this. I believe the Dark Sky website and app will continue to become less accurate... I think the explanation is (somebody who knows more please correct me): Dark Sky's technology was acquired by Apple and integrated into the Apple Weather built-in app... and the decision was made that any improvements/updates/maintenance on the Dark Sky service itself are accessible exclusively through that Apple Weather app now. As a user of the Dark Sky website, I feel sad.

Well, there is a red banner on the site saying

> Support for the Dark Sky iOS app will end on December 31st, 2022, and support for the Dark Sky API will end on March 31st, 2023.

So basically them buying then closing the service to make their own seem better

They made their own actually better if that matters to you. The iOS weather app now has many of DarkSky's features.

It's not just you, but this started well before the Apple acquisition. I "sold" many copies of the Dark Sky app to family and friends just by showing its magic but that magic died awhile ago. I don't think it's been very accurate for 3-4 years now.

This has been happening across nearly every weather source I've been using. My hypothesis is either:

* Climate change is causing problems with forecasting models

* Forecasting models changed, which has introduce unexpected edge cases

The former is going to be literally true on the grounds that climate change is increasing chaos in the system, hence unpredictability increases strikingly.

I'm not sure this happens on the time scale of 'app got acquired', though. It's absolutely going to increase year by year, and if you'd got used to how it was three years ago and didn't notice some of the outlier events, you might be shocked at the new normal.

Climate change absolutely will cause problems with any conceivable forecasting model because you can't encapsulate chaos, only map its expected potential outcomes: and the nasty truth is that energy is fed into the system, those potential outcomes blow up exponentially. Not even slightly linear. So that's what we're seeing.

I've noticed that the "rain starting in your area" alerts are close to correct - and spot-on for the local airport.

So I'd not be surprised if they somehow switched their data source to be not as granular as it once was.

This study claims that there was a decrease in weather prediction accuracy caused by the reduction in commercial flights due to Covid. Maybe there are still some lingering effects from that?

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/07/200717101026.h...

Wow! This is extremely interesting!

While this is confirmation bias, this reflects almost identically with the timeframe in which the forecasts became significantly worse in my area.

Could 5G have something to do with this? https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2022/09/the-trouble-with-5...

> Going from "no rain all day" to actively raining with a huge storm 2 hours later.

Honestly, that's about right here in Florida. :)

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