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Comment by beefman | Hacker News Reader

Folks here said the new Weather app has the same info. I upgraded to iOS 16 about a year before I normally would just to check this. And nope, it doesn't have the one feature I use Dark Sky for – the one feature no other weather app has: the ability to see what the weather was yesterday.

It's what Dark Sky calls "Time Machine". (Can't believe Apple let them use this name this long, now that I think of it.)

(I supported the original crowdfunding campaign for Dark Sky in 2011.)

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> one feature no other weather app has

WeatherNerd: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/weather-nerd/id958363882

Has a calendar icon, tap it to see any actual day historically or, if more tham 2 weeks ahead, based on almanac type prediction. Used to be best out there for considering travel three months from now.

I’m a weather geek with ~4 folder panes of 9 apps each, and WeatherNerd is in the “must have” front pane.

Dark Sky used to be my #1, but was superseded by Carrot (which has a Dark Sky feed) for everyday use and Windy.app at storm-prone water front with microclimates and wind/wave/tide patterns, thanks to meteogram-style overlay of competing weather models for precipitation and wind.

Windy.app: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/windy-app-wind-weather/id99707...

iOS 16 Weather is remarkable though. It’s now easily third on my list, and would likely be first for most people especially since no subscription fee. For instance, try to use apps to look at UV graph for next Saturday — few can. The live background is fun, and the iPad layout is as much detail instrumentation as most people can handle.

But in my book, DarkSky started it all — the race for precise accurate practical usable micro cell weather, and happy for them they are now getting into so many more hands through the new iOS 16 app.

But Carrot is the spiritual successor.

Carrot: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/carrot-weather-alerts-radar/id...

It has TimeTravel too. And because Carrot has a fully editable UI builder, it transmogrifies into whatever weather app you like best.

> Used to be best out there for considering travel three months from now. --

While not directly comparable I love weatherspark for planning travel [0]. I first used it to help plan honeymoon travel.

[0] https://weatherspark.com/

it looks like weathernerd uses the darksky api, so it will have to find a new source for weather data or it’s also gone soon.

Last I subbed to Carrot it supported a few sources but the darksky API was the best there too. Apple pulling it out of community availability hurts.

Won't those apps be able to use Apple's WeatherKit framework to get the same data?

Of course it still affects other platforms like Android or web apps.

Got any Android recommendations? I've been using meteogram because I can configure it to be pretty close to what I want.

My ideal weather app would be able to tell me the chance of rain on a specific route at a specific time. Now that I'm no longer bike commuting, that's not so important. I still like to know chance of rain, per hour, for my location.

On iOS, there is the "Weather on the Way" app, https://apps.apple.com/us/app/on-the-way-road-trip-planner/i.... I bet there's something similar on Android: perhaps search using terms from this app's description to find the closest analog.

You can get weather on route from Climacell, now tomorrow.io, which offers delivery and logistics route planning based on microcells.

https://www.tomorrow.io/

Weather app doesn't even show the hour before. I get it, less features = simpler user interface and less code maintenance... but they could at least start at current hour BUT provide ability to scroll back in time for a few days, perhaps showing that data with 0.5 opacity faded to indicate that the data is no longer relevant (past).

Otherwise I LOVE the updated weather app in iOS 16 where you can see many data points in a nice graph for the next week hourly for things like humidity, wind etc.

I’m not a big fan of this less features ethos. This feature anemic set of software that gets put out more often than not drives me bonkers. It’s as if they don’t want power users.

They want idiots. And then complain when their users are idiots.

I’ve been daydreaming about the possibility of OS support for semi-arbitrary plugins for apps and how those apps could expose certain things for the plug-in to utilize. It’s a very half-baked idea of mine but I’ve wondered if it’s possible to permit the baseline simplicity of an app while giving an outlet for power users to craft something useful atop them. I’m curious how certain apps even permit a plug in architecture in the first place like vscode extensions etc. What do these apps expose that makes it all possible and is there a way to generalize it to all apps.

You want open source software.

Like the sibling commented, that’s what open source is for.

BUT apple specifically has ExtensionKit, which is a library for arbitrary extensions in arbitrary apps. Of course, the host-app needs to support extensions and build it in. So your theorizing about a way for any app to have a plugin, its there. Many system apps in OSes have this feature, and many more apps (eg vscode) support it.

Realistically, web-apps are almost what you want too. Web-apps allow for pretty arbitrary extensions via browser plugins, which can modify the actual UI of the webpage, and make API calls to the backend (by acting as the JavaScript on the page). WebApps are basically open source though (or source available) by nature of how browsers work.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/extensionkit

More than that - apps start off with less features but after enough rounds of updates they grow into full-featured apps again, until some other app with less features (or a less-featured ground-up rewrite) kills it.

It's a really strange (and wholly unnecessary) cycle.

> Weather app doesn't even show the hour before

...which is a reason for people to buy a 3th party app (with a subscription + apple tax.)

Doesn't the graph show exactly what you're asking for? Anything before the vertical line showing the current time shows the historical data for that day?

Depends on which hour you check.

> I get it, less features = simpler

To be fair, this seemingly obvious feature is absent or buried in many/most weather apps and websites I've used. It's certainly not just an Apple™ simplification.

I've noticed the Weather app to be pretty unreliable to be fair.

The amount of times I've looked out the window recently when my phone says it's raining but it's completely dry or vice-versa or it says it's definitely going to rain and it doesn't.

Perhaps no weather app is good enough to deal with Scottish (specifically Glaswegian-ish) weather :)

Same here in Stockholm! WeatherPro seems to hold up pretty well, but the built in weather app is mostly useless. Pretty though!

I'm in Stockholm too. I find klart.se, SMHI or yr.no to work pretty well.

In Gothenburg, I found weather apps pretty substandard compared to AUS where I lived before. I agree though that SMHI seems to be the best, google weather has often been comically off.

Apple Weather's forecast is unusable in the whole of Europe because of the data providers they use. Pretty disappointing to have such a US-centric view on an app that's so integral to a smartphone. They either should work with European data providers or make the app unavailable outside of those markets similar to how they do it with the "news" app.

In the UK it seems to be just about the most reliable for me.

I've always been confused by this, as a lot of European countries provide really good forecast data for free for anyone to use. You would assume that a company the size of Apple would be able to integrate with more than a single provider.

Norwegian: https://developer.yr.no

In Germany Apple lists the very reliable Deutscher Wetterdienst as one of their sources but both services seem to differ, at times quite significantly, in their forecasts.

Hi, I make Weathergraph, a visual weather forecast app/widget/watch complication, and as I am Europe based, the pretty good Finnish Foreca and Norwegian yr.no are among the data sources (along with Open-Meteo - a german, I think, indie project, and Apple Weather / Dark Sky):

https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id1501958576

In the Netherlands we have an app called "Buienalarm" which uses radar to show actual rainclouds as they pass overhead and with predictions of direction. It's awesome with dealing with Amsterdam rain! It worked when I was back in the UK too (and I was just able to add Glasgow to it).

In Denmark, we have "Rainspotter". I believe it was developed by a Dutch guy, and you can see where he got his inspiration.

That was the best single feature in the UWP Weather app on Windows 10 Mobile. It allowed you to see past history data up to 25+ years I believe, hell, they even included a "Past highest/lowest" temperature for every single day so that you could see, that, for example, the lowest temperature on the 8th of August was in 1984.

Also the iOS Weather app uses Weather.com for its data, which is just plain unreliable in Europe.

I really like timeanddate [1] website for looking at past weather. For most cities you can check up to 12 years before.

It's also useful if you want to check what's typical weather in some city.

[1] https://www.timeanddate.com/weather/france/paris/historic

Historical data is still available in the WeatherKit API at least: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/72581627/cant-find-weath...

At the moment it is not working for more than 7 days in the past.

At least it seems to be a known bug: https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/708727

Carrot has it. It’s called Time Machine. I feel like it’s always had it.

Wow that’s what I call a fun app.

One of the reasons I built https://uw.leftium.com/ was so I could compare the previous two days' weather.

It uses the DarkSky API, but also supports other weather API's: https://github.com/Leftium/ultra-weather#readme

Really great. Thank you! And if you make it into an iOS app, I'll buy it.

Environment Canada publish historical weather [0] as do the Met Office [1]. I also recently discovered that the BC government have their own air quality monitoring stations - and that data is also available [2].

[0] - https://climate.weather.gc.ca/index_e.html

[1] - https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/maps-and-data/...

[2] - https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/environment/air-land-wate...

I always use this! Great for assessing business activity and comparing localized weather to activity.

What’s new is that you can tap the hourly forecast card, or the Today entry in the 10-day forecast and get a historical graph for the current day at least.

But yeah, not possible to check yesterday’s weather.

Is it because they don't want you to know how bad their prediction was?

Wunderground allows you to scroll 24 hours back.

What do we expect from stupid Apple. They don’t even store more than the last 100 phone calls. It’s 2020. Their phone is more powerful than supercomputers from the 90s. It can’t store more than 100 phone numbers.

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