Apple Shutting Down Popular Weather App 'Dark Sky' Tomorrow | Hacker News Reader

Apple Shutting Down Popular Weather App 'Dark Sky' Tomorrow

macrumors.com

82 pointstosh62 comments

Apple never integrated the hourly precipitation timelines which I relied on day to day. I was scared I was gonna miss it so I recently worked on a replacement called merrysky. It's backed by the awesome pirateweather.net API

check it out https://merrysky.net/forecast/riverside%20oh/us

It's responsive and no need to install an app but you can add it as an home icon on your device, instructions in the FAQ

How accurate is PirateWeather? I see it uses NOAA data.

I've been relying on AccuWeather as of late, and it's been pretty reliable.

I switched to Accuweather after IBM ruined WeatherUnderground App. Still not as good as the old Wunderground app but it is 90-95% what I liked about the WU

accuweather sells geolocation data

third party weather sites/apps seem to be pretty scammy in general

If you're interested in learning more about the pirateweather data sources and process, you can check out this article which goes into great detail.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/publicsector/making-weather-for...

I'm relying on it in Canada now so I can certainly vouch for it in my area. We had a snowstorm and power outages during holidays and it was great to follow the graphs with regards to wind/gust and precipitations.

unless i'm missing something I've been able to see the precipitation timelines for some time now in their weather app and widget, at least an hour out. (e.g. "Light rain is expected to stop in 17 min")

this was one of my favorite features too but afaict they integrated it (i'm on ios 16.3)

I'm on 16.2, unless they revamped it all in that minor update, it's not cutting it for me. I know that there's a precipitation bar chart but it's a lot of toggling back and forth. I want to see a few days of precipitation and their accumulation/intensity in the same screen for planning out activities. Also, with this new website I will be able to keep browsing that data on desktop as well.

Yes they did, I'm looking at it right now.

They didn’t bring over all the functionality.

Dark sky has hour by hour by percent probability as well as projected precipitation.

Apple has a rounded percent in two hour blocks. And its numbers are different. For example, Apple shows the moon and stars icon for 6pm; DS shows 28% and .01 inch/hour.

Apple consistently has less information and I’ll miss DarkSky. I paid $5 and don’t usually buy apps.

I think Apple’s purchase is a negative for users.

buy apps. labor isn't free

You buy an app.

Apple buys out the app developer Apple kills the app

You don't have your app now

I don’t understand your point. I did buy the app.

We did buy the app :)

You mean the clear/rainy/cloudy linear viz?

There is a hourly precipitation graph available since iOS16 but that may not be what you're looking for.

Thanks! Probably time to stop using a native app for weather anyway.

Merry Sky looks great. You've really captured that nice line between detail and 'at-a-glance' that made Dark Sky a pleasure to use. Thanks!

On my Desktop, I use accuweather and occasionally https://www.timeanddate.com/weather/ - among so many others. None really gave me a UI that I felt comfortable using. Always clicking to get additional data or overloaded with non-vital information.

On Android - after the Dark Sky fiasco - I settled on Yr[0] eventually.

Merry Sky looks poised to replace my Desktop weather links already (I use my own local custom home page). On Android, the (home icon) link leads to a really nice looking "Android App". Yr will be harder to replace but Merry Sky has already found a home here (just need time to verify its accuracy).

[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=no.nrk.yr&gl=U...

Thanks, I'm really shooting for that sweet spot on information density. I think it's in a good shape to be shared now but I'll be iterating on it based on feedback and my own ideas going forward.

Yr looks really nice too but I don't carry a droid day to day.

I'd like to keep merrysky as a lightweight alternative on the web and have the same experience regardless of the platform/OS

MerrySky is 30-50 degrees in error at 44.9603383,-93.350066 but https://weather.pirateweather.net/ gets it right.

Hi, it's possible you were looking at it in Celcius? It currently defaults to to the SI unit preset (displayed at the top right of the page) if you had not selected a preference yet. I will be changing that soon to be smarter and default to the unit based on location. This link should be good for you in the meantime: https://merrysky.net/forecast/44.9603383,-93.350066/us

If you're still seeing a discrepancy, feel free to email me with the debugging information so we can clear that up. feedback@merrysky.net

You nailed it; that was my oversight. Love the site!

Just logged in to say thank you for the replacement. I'll be using it every day

Cheers!

I really loved the app, the apple weather app layout kind of sucks in comparison. Rather than a simple scroll page to see all the hourly forecast detail the apple app has a stupid drop down.

I used the excellent Dark Sky API in my home automation tool to integrate hints on whether it would start raining soon. That let it warn us to close open windows, etc. The API is going away on March 31st, so I'm headed for a rewrite and loss of some functionality. This is no fun.

Check out pirateweather.net; most of the Dark Sky API functionality is available

Wow, thank you!!

Kind of sucks that companies buy their competitors just to disable them.

They integrated the team into their own free weather offerings.

In theory, all of the features of Dark Sky are now present in Weather. In practice, it doesn't seem that way.

I'm not sure I used any of the features that haven't been ported over yet, maybe the local reporting feature which I was never sure if it actually did anything. In practice the stock weather app is good enough for me now.

It’s all there, but the app is designed in the modern Apple framework where the top 5 things are front and center, but features that aren’t in the top 5 are buried in awkward, undiscoverable places.

Even several clicks deep, I can't find any way to show the precipitation probability forecast by hour. I (eventually) have eight options, but that isn't one.

Except some of the Apple Watch complications. Still missing.

That also leaves former Android users of Dark sky out in the cold. I've been using the website since, but that disappears in March as well.

Good point, I wasn't thinking about the Android side of things.

This should be illegal

Precisely what law do you propose?

Oligopolies are the way of the world it seems.

I've been hopeful that the Apple Weather app would improve over the intervening months but have been disappointed to see that it hasn't. This is especially surprising because I live a stone's throw from Cupertino, where I would assume its shortcomings would be noticed by Apple employees!

Companies like Apple always scratch their own itch. Cupertino doesn’t really have alot of weather variance. It tells you about rain.

Sure, I was referring to the mediocre temperature forecasting of Apple Weather. It is also inexplicable that my wife and I will receive different forecasts on our iPhones while standing next to each other in our home.

I suspect this isn't the case for you since you've spent time thinking about it. But for some people, it might make sense depending on their privacy settings, which can deny fine-grained location information to apps.

Honestly, I'd never thought to check, since I assumed the first-party Weather app wouldn't have a location opt-out. But it turns out Apple gives all the normal options (all the time, only when app is open, detailed location) that they give for third-party apps. Good for them! But sadly, our settings are identical and the discrepancies (both short-term and long-term forecasts) persist.

Just to be granular and pedantic: if your settings are identical and you are both denying the app your detailed location, then it still could make sense since you'd both be placed into slightly different locations. I also assume that isn't the case but am just mentioning it.

Pedantry is no trouble; we both allow detailed location, so there's no excuse for different results! It would also be bizarre to show a different long-term forecast to two people that are 1-2 miles apart (esp. in the Bay Area, where weather is relatively stable).

Ah gotcha. I noticed similar things happening when I was really paying attention in the spring (little league baseball season).

Personally, I found MyRadar to be the best alternative. The mapping is much better so you can get an intuitive feel for the accuracy of the forecast.

Dark Sky was fantastic, and their API was great to use. They provided a very intuitive way to get both hyperlocal, and general forecast data, along with their nice graphics and icons as well. Way back when I built a bunch of geeklets for geektool using it to embed into the mac desktop so it's always there.

I liked their morning "do I need an umbrella today" report as well. Useful in an easy minimalistic way.

It's nice to see the Apple weather app pick up a lot of the Dark Sky features, but it's still not nearly as nice to use the Dark Sky app. The Dark Sky site has been in my bookmarks bar for probably a decade as well. The easiest way to get all the info you really need without all the fluff that most other weather sites load you on. Info rich without being overly dense. I find the Apple Weather app to be the opposite. It's info dense, but harder to pick out the items that matter (although that could just be muscle memory from using Dark Sky for so long).

I finally paid for Carrot Weather, and it is very much pitched as a Dark Sky replacement right now. The default (customizable) layout is a pitch-perfect Dark Sky copy, and the default (configurable) data source is also Dark Sky.

It will also send daily notifications when you need an umbrella or sunscreen.

If you're looking a new weather app, I highly recommend: https://helloweather.com

Edit: Used to use the Dark Sky API, but they have multiple data sources you can toggle in the app.

In case anyone else notices their API source is Dark Sky, they talk about it on their blog: https://helloweather.com/blog/update-on-dark-sky

They should have made it clearer in the app instead of me searching their blog

Looks nice. Interestingly i opened the app and it lists "Dark Sky" as the source.. does that mean this app's functionality will decline when Dark Sky dies?

edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34198682 has my answer

If I'm reading it correctly the free version is just a wrapper around Dark Sky API, which will continue working for three more months (end of March).

A whole bunch of weather apps are just a different frontend behind Dark Sky's API. WeatherKit[0] is supposed to be its replacement, but I don't know how it compares.

0 - https://developer.apple.com/weatherkit/

Since a lot of people seem to be mostly missing notifications about rain: After I've learned that rain predictions were almost never correct for my location, I've started to use the app from rain-alarm.com which notifies you of actual rain clouds in your vicinity (configurable) using radar imagery. While this still doesn't mean the cloud will actually move over your exact location, it - for my place here - is a far more reliable indicator than any of the weather services I've tried.

I switched to Geometric Weather and so far I'm happy with it.

https://github.com/WangDaYeeeeee/GeometricWeather-iOS

https://github.com/WangDaYeeeeee/GeometricWeather

I knew this day would come.

What an utter disappointment the whole journey ended up being.

Apple claims that its Weather App has integrated DS’s features. However, for a few times it’s ridiculously wrong. It said it’s cloudy when it’s raining onto the very phone, which I don’t remember happened to DS. Forecast for the next hour feels like as accurate as forecast for next month. I live in New England. I am going to miss DS a lot.

Please use the "Report an Issue" link at the bottom of the weather page to train their model or at least notify them that the assessment is wrong.

I loved this app so much.

The app was never available outside of the US (at least it wasn't in France) so no big loss for me.

I don't quite get why it was so. Ok there was no microscale forecast/rain alert support for the area but it would have been quite useful without it still.

Been using Dark Sky here in the UK for a few years. Open app, see all you need. Fantastic app.

Apple Weather is mediocre at best.

And still AQI only provided for a handful of countries.

Embrace and extinguish.

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