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Comment by chatmasta | Hacker News Reader

Have you used the latest Weather app? Which DarkSky features is it missing?

The unmatched clarity and simplicity of the data. The Weather app isn't in the same league. To my eye, it's a cluttered, gaudy mess, certainly compared to Dark Sky.

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).

The blog post does a good job of enumerating the nice interfaces in Dark Sky. But it spends no time comparing them to the equivalents in Weather app. If it did, then the parity of features would become clear, not only in terms of information presented but also user interface.

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?

It is cluttered and messy. Or, if you prefer, it does not have the feature of thoughtful information design that was a primary factor in Dark Sky's success, in favor of cartoonish and distracting animations and cluttered layout. The presence of information or functionality is not the only factor in success. (If it were, the Diamond Rio would be more iconic than the iPod, because it could arguably do more, though sometimes with less capacity given the timing.)

I remember darksky used to seed me notifications that were something like “Rain in your location starting in 2 minutes.” You could almost set a timer based on it. 2 minutes later it would be raining. It was super helpful when doing things outside with the family. If the current weather app can do this, I don’t know how.

Click the settings hamburger (a universally recognized icon on iOS, and one of only two buttons on the main page of the Weather app). Then there is a prominent banner that says “Stay Informed: Get notifications for severe weather, rain or snow near you.” Once you enable this, you can then configure the alerts to include severe weather, or simply rain in the next hour.

For anyone else struggling to find it with these instructions: I had to choose a location (I have a few added), then scroll all the way to the bottom (past averages, past "Report an Issue") and there's an easily-overlooked "Manage Notifications" button.

I had turned mine off, probably from way back when I used Dark Sky and didn't want redundant notifications.

Weird, for me it’s in the corner in a sticky footer. I’m on iOS 17.6 and iPhone 15 Pro.

Just realized there's an iOS update - it hadn't notified me yet. I'm on an iPhone 14, but still running 17.5.1 for the next few minutes..

From Weather app and MyRadar last night - https://imgur.com/a/EnEXCGD

The Apple Weather app is unreliable.

In fairness to Apple Weather, hyperlocal forecasts have inexplicably gotten far, far worse in the last few years (in my own anecdata anyway).

It feels like quite the coincidence that hyperlocal weather prediction got worse after Dark Sky went away.

But, I don’t have any domain knowledge in this area. Perhaps, it is just more difficult due to climate change or other factors.

I've suspected, without any knowledge/evidence, that the increasing energy in the atmosphere has made all forecasts harder in recent years.

I did notice that Dark Sky's hyperlocal weather was getting bad in my area at the end. I wonder if it has anything to do with 5G frequency rollouts. I had seen some warnings about accurate weather predictions could be affected by it, but a quick search isn't showing any "Turns out 5G is/is not messing with our weather satellites" follow-up articles

Hyperlocal forecasts are an aggregate of other weather sources and radar.

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...

Interestingly, COVID played a big roll in that. Commercial aircraft often report back weather conditions. During COVID, the reduction in commercial air traffic drastically reduced air borne information collection. It just hasn’t seemed to return to its prior quality after that.

I personally find, I’ve had to learn how to read a weather map to get a good understanding of forecasts

> Commercial aircraft often report back weather conditions

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?

Pretty sure it's all automated. Aircraft already have all of the necessary sensors onboard, so it's just a matter of transmitting it back to the ground.

> 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:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-wvE3iXT-A

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0Xx0E8cs7U

> I repeat my original question: can anyone actually name a feature from DarkSky that isn’t present in the current Weather app?

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.

Weather history/future. Currently you can look 1 day in the past in Apple Weather. Dark Sky allowed you to look years into the past. Dark Sky also allowed you to look more than 10/14 days into the future. It used historical averages to show you for a specific day instead of some fancy prediction, but it was nice to have.

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.

> can anyone actually name a feature from DarkSky that isn’t present in the current Weather app?

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 agree with you in that no other app has comparable data to the weather data that Dark Sky had and the layout was amazing. Yes someones comment that the weather app has more features but its the quality of the features that are missing.

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)

I feel like people obsess over Dark Sky because it would have slotted almost unchanged into some hypothetical post-Mac OS 9 design language if "lickable" OS X had never existed. Or, if you prefer, Dark Sky embodied the engineered simplicity and power that made people so loyal to the earliest Apple GUI software in favor of the more, uh, ebullient character that has driven the last 20 years of Apple UI design (sic). Note that I still put Apple's UI design well ahead of both Android and Microsoft, but it has regressed substantially.

The biggest thing I find Weather to be missing is hyperlocal & timely accuracy.

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.

Assuming this is true, why did it happen? Presumably Apple is using the same data feeds and backend as Dark Sky? Or are they missing something?

I don't think that's a safe assumption. The effect was immediate and noticeable. I've seen other posts in this thread after I said this that suggested this was a cost savings measure.

From using the Apple Weather app, I didn’t get the feeling that Apple Weather actually adopted much of the guts of Dark Sky, even though Apple promised to do so.

Weather has hyperlocal precipitation alerts.

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.

If I wanted to see the heat index at 3PM in Dark Sky, I could just tap the "feels like" button under the hourly forecast (pictured further down in the linked blog post) and look at what it says at 3PM.

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

Why would you need degree-perfect precision in a subjective measurement? Eyeball it. It’ll feel like around 90ish. Or it’ll feel like around 85ish. There’s no reason for an indication that it’ll feel 87.500.

You only need to cross-navigate detail views (via the drop-down) if you start by looking at some other piece of information.

1. Scroll to the "Feels Like" tile

2. Tap it

Weather app is no where near as accurate and its slow (especially on any radar work). The features may be there but they aren't well implemented.

With DarkSky, you used to be able to report current weather conditions. Augmenting weather modeling from sensors with real-time reports from users is critical for high levels of accuracy. Somehow this seems to have been completely overlooked in the integration with Apple's weather app.

You can do this in the Weather app. Click “report an issue” and it asks you to report current conditions in your area.

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.

It doesn’t seem to be nearly as accurate. I’ve abandoned the Apple Weather app in favor of The Weather Channel App, because the former seemed unreliable to me.

It's crap. No offense intended if you are on the team maintaining Apple Weather, but the interface is much more busy than DarkSky was and there is a lot less clarity and simplicity in how weather information is displayed. My impression is that the quality of the forecasts is also not as good, but that might just be my personal bias.

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.

% cloud cover by hour

You’re right, this one is missing. Although I’m skeptical of the utility (and accuracy) of something as precise as “percentage of cloud cover,” compared to what is available in the app, namely “clear, cloudy, mostly sunny, etc.”

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 would expect certain segments of aviation to find the additional granularity critical.

Presumably they shouldn’t be using a consumer weather service and mobile app.

in my experience its more like: 0-5% - Sunny; 5-60% - Partly Cloudy; 60-100% - Cloudy;

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

The best cloud cover that I've found is yr.no

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.

At the fringes, there is a meaningful difference. The center 50%, not really.

A 95% coverage day is a bit different than a 100% coverage day. Particularly, when it comes to rain and wind expectations.

How is that difference meaningful? What actions are you going to take differently at 95% cloud coverage vs 100%? I can't think of anything I'd do differently if I was expecting 100% cloud coverage tomorrow to wake up and find that it was actually at 95%.

Yeah, and I’d argue that if the difference is meaningful to you, then you probably want something more accurate than what a consumer-grade weather service can provide. So it would be borderline irresponsible of Apple to even give you the false confidence of some precise measurement of cloud cover.

There's a link at the top of this comment section that goes over it.

That’s a link to a discussion from March 2023. My question is about which features are missing from the latest Weather app, after more than a year of improvement.

Weather app is not accurate and its slow.

The features may be there but they aren't well implemented.

Diluted for the masses.

The feature where it tells me the weather.

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.

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