Dark Sky was genuinely the most irreplaceable app I've ever used. I don't think I'll ever forgive Apple's butchering it for spare parts.
Besides the API, besides the hyper-local (and, in my experience, _always_ accurate) forecasts, besides the excellent visualizations, besides the nice web app, what I miss most was the history.
I loved the history. It was perhaps DarkSky's least appreciated feature.
You could search (at least within the US) for any date in the past few decades, and find the temperature and precipitation and whatnot for a given location.
You could see what the weather was like on those important dates in your life. You could see what the weather was like the day after those important dates in your life.
It's a little bit of memory that's been excised from the commons. It still makes me sad.
Any clue why? Did broadening the pool of reporting devices from Dark Sky users to the general iPhone population somehow break their models?
But IIRC, DarkSky stopped using phones altogether some time before Apple killed the service. I can't find a source on that given Apple also deleted DarkSky's blog, so, grain of salt.
I'd go as far to say that the absence of past weather data in most weather apps is symbolic of the wider state of design today. Anyone with any real design knowledge, any basic capacity to synthesize argument or think about problems, would find it obvious that showing past weather is useful because it provides context. So many statistical apps (so-called "dashboards") are such drek because of this too.
It's included now, but still not as well as Dark Sky did it.
For an app not trying to reproduce Dark Sky, but doing a nice job with an overview of the day's weather, I've been using Overlook. But now I'm seeing that its app store listing is gone. https://apps.apple.com/app/overlook-weather/id1639571738
Ongoing customer value (hyper-local precipitation forecasts) that has ongoing costs for the developer (weather data) is unsustainable without ongoing revenue (subscriptions). This may have had a thing or two to do with Dark Sky ending in an acquihire.
While the radar view is nice, the outlook view is very nice.
From a screen shot of the screen shot in the App Store: https://imgur.com/a/U8o1DJw and my own outlook
The 'ring' data view at the top (and bottom of the second image) is a nice way to represent the data in a limited amount of space (phone / watch widgets).
> Data Used to Track You
> The following data may be used to track you across apps and websites owned by other companies:
> Location
> Identifiers
> Usage Data
Which view do you mean? I was a longtime Dark Sky user, and now I switch between Carrot and Apple Weather.
I’m using the weather app now, but am still longing for the spiritual successor to Dark Sky.
I had a similar feeling when Google bought and killed Sparrow. They should have simply replaced the Gmail app with Sparrow, instead, they killed the only email client I ever genuinely enjoyed using.
No excuse to not just buy Dark Sky and let them continue unburdened by corporate politics
Carrot Weather has a mode that is almost a replacement for Dark Sky, btw, though the location-based alerts have gotten less and less reliable over the years (which I am completely unable to understand).
Also, FWIW this post is from 2023, and the Weather app has improved significantly since then.
For example, the post references a Reddit comment complaining about the lack of a precipitation map:
> there anything that has the precipitation graph similar to dark sky
This is available in Weather app. You can see the hourly graph, and you can also see the map with precipitation overlay.
The notification feature you ask for is also supported.
I repeat my original question: can anyone actually name a feature from DarkSky that isn’t present in the current Weather app?
I had turned mine off, probably from way back when I used Dark Sky and didn't want redundant notifications.
But, I don’t have any domain knowledge in this area. Perhaps, it is just more difficult due to climate change or other factors.
Things like the funding of NOAA or reallocation of funds within it can impact NOAA's ability to provide the data that is used to drive this (and other) weather and climate decisions. https://www.federaltimes.com/opinions/2024/04/30/noaas-budge...
I personally find, I’ve had to learn how to read a weather map to get a good understanding of forecasts
Is this done via some automated system, or do pilots report it manually?
I’d be curious to read more about this - do weather companies have partnerships with airlines where they pay them to carry sensors?
> do weather companies have partnerships with airlines where they pay them to carry sensors?
Nearly all of the US's forecasts come from the NOAA. Nearly every other "weather company" is simply reformatting this data.
I can't remember exactly what video I watched on the topic, but these two may be interesting:
As others have already mentioned, the fact that it displayed weather information in a clear and uncluttered way, and had a simple user interface. Apple Weather is a gaudy mess.
There was also a "Check out Cool Storms" feature that let you see the weather map for an interesting storm that was happening at the moment.
Notifications were also more configurable. You could set it to notify you if the precipitation chance were higher than a certain percentage or if the high were below or above a certain temp.
Easy. As the screenshots show, the DarkSky main page would _dynamically adjust_ the information it shows you: adding radar, precip level, combined precip/temperature forcecast, etc. The fact that those elements can be found individually by poking through three or four screens in the Weather app doesn't make them equivalent.
I sometimes think that the reason Dark Sky was so good is that it spent a lot of money on the data side of things and probably refreshed their data and models much more than a larger company would. They were probably burning their money quite fast. As a function of the acquisition Apple tried to reduce the spend on data/processing while keeping the functions (it didn't succeed). Weather app has the same problem.
All in all - seems like a well traveled road: nimble company trying to acquire new customers/market has better features until large companies take over and drive profit/revenue - diluting quality and pushing away customers. (different incentives)
The features may be there but they aren't well implemented.
Diluted for the masses.
Is there a meaningful difference between 25% cloud cover and 35%? Or is it better to just give names to the “conditions” at buckets of 25%, 50%, 75%, etc?
I've not seen other descriptors, and to view it changing over time its just on the timeline as a sun, sun+cloud & cloud emoji's
It's not useful other than as a binary 'is it cloudy' which in Bay Area weather it is a meaningful difference between 30% and 60% coverage
For example (and it always takes a bit for me to find it) https://www.yr.no/en/details/table/2-4887398/United%20States... (and https://www.yr.no/en/details/graph/2-4887398/United%20States... )
And here's their API - https://developer.yr.no/featured-products/forecast/
It breaks it down by overall, low, medium, and high clouds.
A 95% coverage day is a bit different than a 100% coverage day. Particularly, when it comes to rain and wind expectations.
Admittedly this information is not surfaced in any way like “other users say it’s raining.” And “report an issue” isn’t a great name. But it does say they incorporate user reports into their data.
I just tried in Apple Weather, and the process was:
1. Tap on the hourly forecast, or the day, to go into the graph screen
2. Tap on the dropdown icon
3. Tap "feels like"
4. Either drag your finger along the graph until the time indicator at the top indicates you're close to 3PM, then read the temperature, or you can try to read it directly off the graph, but the axes aren't labeled clearly enough to make this feasible
1. Scroll to the "Feels Like" tile
2. Tap it
While I understand the UI complaints others have, for the handful of things I normally want to see I find Weather fine enough vs Dark Sky. BUT, the accuracy took a noticeable downward trend.
I don't believe Weather or Dark Sky have had hyperlocal weather forecasting. I would absolutely love such a feature (since I live far from the center of town in an area with microclimates); I would say both were equivalently faulty on my weather forecasts.
I'd say there's about a 80% chance that it loads the forecast in under 5 seconds.
Loading the radar has far worse performance - it only works ~50% of the time and failures just show an empty map forever.
When it does manage to load the weather I've found the accuracy to be hot garbage.
The fact that Apple chose to shut down one of the best apps on the iPhone in order to promote Apple Weather is still really irritating. I keep Darksky in the app graveyard on my phone, next to Apollo.