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Comment by flkiwi | Hacker News Reader

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).

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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?

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

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.)

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 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.

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 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.

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