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Comment by jasonmccay | Hacker News Reader

Yes! The ability to be outside, pull out your phone, and get an almost-to-the-minute awareness of when it was going to rain felt magical, right out of Back to the Future 2. I used this countless times.

So much of weather forecasting, at that time, was about trends and probabilities. DarkSky was about events, certainty, and action.

It was truly ahead of anything else and forced a new standard.

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> The ability to be outside, pull out your phone, and get an almost-to-the-minute awareness of when it was going to rain felt magical

But iOS has this now. It's the same thing. They integrated it from Dark Sky.

it doesn't work nearly as well. i'm not sure why, but the predictions are significantly worse than dark sky's were

I agree. One of the weird things is that the precipitation map will show rain coming that doesn't show anywhere else in the Weather app. Nearly every time that happens, the map is the one that's correct. And usually forecast.weather.gov will align with the map as well (and provide a better forecast than the app).

But that's the point. The map is based on the Dark Sky algorithm and only goes out an hour or so. And that's where the next-hour precipitation graph comes from -- and I've never seen them not match. Everything else is standard weather forecasts. Dark Sky itself worked the same way. It wasn't making 6-hour forecasts using its 1-hour algorithm. The results would have been terrible.

This is why I don't understand the complaints that iOS precipitation accuracy is worse than Dark Sky's. The map works the same way. The chart works the same way. Complaints about UX I get. But not the complaints about a supposed fall in precipitation accuracy.

I get that it's a common trope that products always supposedly get worse once they're bought. But in this case, in terms of accuracy, I just don't think it's true. And remember, Apple would have zero reason to worsen the quality. The whole point of buying it was to improve iOS weather. Which it did.

to each their own, but i used darksky for years as a daily bicycle commuter and found it to be profoundly accurate--to the point where i could use it to find clear patches of 15-20min to ride home in. there was a marked decline in the reliability & accuracy of the information provided to me once i was forced to switch to apple weather

I dunno. I literally use Apple Weather for that (can I run an errand in the next 25 min before the rain comes back) and it works the same as it did with Dark Sky. No decline that I've noticed. Like, it doesn't suddenly start raining after only 10 min when the app said I'd have 25 min.

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