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The feature I miss most about Dark Sky was that it allowed you to visualize changes in dew point throughout the day.
Where I live (US East Coast), the weather can feel dramatically different depending on the humidity. Relative Humidity has always felt to me like a poor way of measuring how humid the weather will feel. For example, 50% RH at 84ºF will feel lightly humid and generally pleasant, whereas 50% RH at at 97ºF will feel like a swamp. The dew points at those respective points - 63ºF and 75ºF - do a much better job at immediately conveying how humid the air will feel.
Dark Sky used to show hourly dew point graphs that you could browse throughout the week and see when the humidity would break (or return). Apple Weather does show you the dew point, but only when you select a point on the RH graph. So to track the dew point over the coming week, you basically need to drag your finger over each day's graph and observe the changing numbers.
I think this is probably just due to the lack of general awareness about how dew point is a more elegant shorthand for "absolute humidity" than any other weather metric currently in use. I hope there will be more of us in the future!
https://weather-sense.leftium.com
My web app plots hourly dew point for the next 24 hours, next 7 days, and past 2 days. (Still WIP.)
Inspired by https://merrysky.net (can also plot dew point), which was inspired by Dark Sky.
Good idea! I just added humidity to my home screen widget using https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cloud3squa...
I too miss the dew point feature. The best replacement for Dark Sky I've found is this 10-day view of Weather Underground that's unfortunately only available on their website—I just bookmark the website on my phone home screen. https://www.wunderground.com/forecast/us/tx/austin/30.27,-97...
I am completely with you.
For me, I've written myself a Google Apps script - to be more accurate, AI did, but with my interaction - that e-mails a "humidity forecast" as to how wet the next six days are going to feel to me in a simple way. I don't know who came up with the categories I've placed them in - it seemed to be common weather information.
https://github.com/mollyrealized/humid-fcast/blob/main/Code....
Relative Humidity is directly tied to the dew point. Take a look back at the humidity forecast and look right under the humidity percentage. The dew point is there. If you tap a point in the future on the graph of forecast changes, the dew point is also registered there.
I'm moving to NYC tomorrow, after spending my entire life on the West Coast.
Thanks for teaching me about dew point (and to the commenters below you for letting me know there's a free Dark Sky clone - merrysky.net - and a dew point graph on Weather Underground)!
Here in Houston as well, dew point is as important as temperature and %PoP. Apple Weather suffices for now but I hope it gets richer with the various types of data that are of greater relevance in different regions.
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.
To put it gently, Apple destroyed a fantastically valuable piece of software and made my life worse. Since then, Apple has failed to come close to offering in their weather app what DarkSky offered for years prior.
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.
The first year of the new weather app they didn't even give you hourly precipitation chance throughout the day. If I had to pick what were the two key features of Dark Sky it would be 1) impending rain notifications, and 2) hourly precipitation chances.
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
Been using Merry Sky (https://merrysky.net) quite happily as a replacement mostly for the layout/quick data viz. Mostly accurate/helpful as Dark Sky was, tho some rare data blackouts when it can't pull the data or whatever, but it's back in a few hours
I miss Dark Sky a lot and Apple totally screwed it up. I sponsor the Pirate Weather (https://pirateweather.net/) project which duplicates the Dark Sky API and used it to make my own display: https://blog.jgc.org/2023/04/a-personal-weather-picture-usin...
Pirate Weather is the backend for the Dark Sky-like Merry Sky: https://merrysky.net/
The Dark Sky blog [1] had a post on their (then-new) app design, and also had many other posts on some details of their weather prediction algorithms and other technical bits. Sadly the blog was deleted after the Apple acquisition, but it is archived on the Wayback Machine. Some good reading!
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20191210071310/https://blog.dark...
I used to use darksky a lot, because it reminded me of Back To The Future 2 when it'd do the "done raining in 5 mins". It's a stupid request, but if other services could figure this out along with a cute UI like darksky, I'd be your best friend. Weather sites can have the best info, but if the UI is not good then its much harder to draw conclusions from the stats.
Tangent maybe. But when I used Dark Sky, I and everyone who asked me about the weather and I'd give them data from Dark Sky were always impressed by my accuracy for knowing when it would rain and stop raining. Now I use Carrot with the AccuWeather(sp) api, and it'll be pouring right on top of me, and Carrot tells me "no rain for the hour". Is this just weather getting harder and harder to predict, or is AccuWeather trash, or anyone else find something that seems as accurate as Dark Sky was?
I dearly wish Apple would just publish Dark Sky again. Let the Weather app be whatever super clean design hero you want, just give us back this perfect information dense weather app to use day to day.
There have to be dozens of devs in apple who would love to be on the 1-2 person team it would take to maintain it. (It was a 2 person startup for years, don't come at me with how hard stuff is.) It could even be a reward for good service, "ok you successfully mucked around with weird EU privacy law in the health app for 2 years, instead of a sabbatical for therapy how about you get to work on Dark Sky for a year?"
Is DarkSky not an actual weather app?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35268026
> Meteorologists seemed to feel that Dark Sky was a graphics processing tool, not a weather app.
---
“Any weather forecast beyond a couple of hours ... depend on supercomputer models that work according to the laws of physics ... But when we talk about Dark Sky, all it was doing was taking the visual input of the radar and extrapolating what was going to happen over the next couple of hours.”
When Apple killed Dark Sky, I ended up with Weather Strip. It does a really good job of giving me the same amount of information density. Possibly even better - one fairly readable graph combines rain probability, temperature, cloudiness, and estimated inches of rain into a single glance. https://www.weatherstrip.app
I find it wild that no one has fully replaced Dark Sky, ideally with an outright clone. Both the visualization and the unique "it's about to rain where you are" prediction system. I've tried a lot of clones of the latter and none work nearly as well.
These days I go to windy.com for my weather nerd needs but it's quite different from Dark Sky.
Dark Sky was their lesser product. Their "lines" interface at forecast.io/lines before they rebranded was peak weather UI, but the internet has almost no record of it ever existing.
The one problem it had, that it still has to this day under Apple's reign, is not being able to tell the difference between clear skies and if the precipitation map tiles are still loading.
I don't get it. What is the irreplaceable part? You're all software engineers. Why don't you just write the software you're missing?
I'd do it but I know I don't care about the weather like this. I just ask my voice assistant in broad terms. So I would suck at building it. But you guys all care. Why is it non replicable?
On a related note, I had to stop using the Apple weather app because it doesn’t even get the current temperature right at my house. Right now, Apple weather is saying it’s 61 degrees and Weather Underground is saying 72.
Here me out: Dark Sky amazingness is why we need to get rid of these tech monopolies
None of this amazing innovation comes from big companies
Now it’s swallowed up, resting and vesting
I've been using flowX for many years, first on android and now on ios. I've found it to be incredibly customisable, and particularly good at visualising incoming weather. Gladly paid for it for years now
I love data visualization and run https://weathergraph.app - an iOS/Apple watch/mac app that people often praise for getting many weather metrics into one view. Dew point is surprisingly underrated metric that strongly affects how the weather feels like.
It also has a ‘Dark Sky emulation’ mode for everyone who loved the now defunct app.
I use Foreca, which consistently ranks among top 3 services on forecastadvisor.com, and Pirate Weather & Open-Meteo, which are two awesome indie services that access and enrich the best public models.
Here is how it looks like: https://imgur.com/gallery/Rduy7qc
Side note but I've downloaded and tried 10-15 weather apps this week. All I want to do is see the weather for the rest of the day, and then the rest of the week. None of them can really do it. The best ones can give you a few hours of the day (horizontal) and then a couple of days (vertical) (why the format change?). All of them completely waste all of their screen space with useless things like one gigantic temperature icon or just pictures of clouds. Invariably they have all the data you need but it's not considered important enough to put on the screen and you have to scroll.
The old Weather Underground weather app is another example of an acquisition destroying superb graphics design. Its clarity, information density, and beauty has yet to be matched.
Not quite as feature-rich, but for a similar “shape-based” UI, Weather Strip is fantastic. It provides, IMO, an even clearer picture of the weather than dark sky did.
I've never used Dark Sky, but the most innovative weather app/site I've used is definitely Weather Underground. Their radar and 10-day view are second to none.
It does sound like Dark Sky had one useful feature that has no match - analyzing weather radar and sending personalized rain alert push notifications based on your location. That's pretty awesome.
Dark Sky was incredible. I could time my out door activity like going for a run or do yard work based on its real time rain alerts down to the minute or two. Haven't found anything that accurate for forecasting. I was really hoping Apple would've merged some of that into their own IOS weather app. But it never happened.
Weather Line was another beautifully weather app based on Dark Sky I really miss:
I actually like the weather gov format, it's how my brain works
put your lat/lon on the end
(google HQ) https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?FcstType=graphical...
(amazon HQ) https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?FcstType=graphical...
The data is open/free, you can pull down the raw data and make it look however you want.
I just wish there was an easy website to get Google's new AI weather which supposedly is far more accurate (only on certain android builds?)
After the shutdown of Dark Sky, I switched to Carrot, which added a layout that mimics Dark Sky's design (the layout option is called "Anubis" in the Carrot app). I've found it to be a largely seamless replacement.
I have never used Dark Sky, although I have to say the Apple Weather app is one of the best I've seen so far (for my area). It works really well and it can often tell weather changes down to the minute.
I always thought Dark Sky had one of the worst UI's on the planet.
I like this simplistic presentation of Weather Strip https://www.weatherstrip.app/
I think it builds upon this Wetter for iOS app http://wetter.micw.org/apps/wetter/index.php
Wetter is more detailed and complicated to read as compared to Weather Strip but I like the information such as CAPE and pressure info.
In Switzerland, many people use the government-develpped weather app (MeteoSwiss). It havs very similar visualizations like DarkSky it seems.
They also have a web interface, if you want to check it out, though the app is better: https://www.meteoschweiz.admin.ch/lokalprognose/zuerich/8001...
The dark sky API was the backbone of several tinkering projects that I built when first getting in to coding. Fond memories and many thanks to the dark sky devs
My "favorite" behavior on the new post-DarkSky Weather app is that each of the phones in the house give different info re the weather directly outside. The worst is my child's phone which has its language set to Mandarin (the only substantive difference between their phone and our phones). Their Weather app is usually way off from our phones. None of the phones match the info given by NWS.
Why do people care about checking the weather in detail so much? Tomorrow it will probably be like today, unless it does/does not precipitate.
Just as the author of this blog, I found Dark Sky UI uniquely concise and informative. I managed to somewhat replace it with not one, but two apps (on Android):
- OpenWeather for a dense, one-page view of short-term upcoming conditions (temperature, precipitation) and the weekly forecast.
- Shadow Weather for extra details: cloud cover, wind directions, etc.
Are there any comparisons of weather apps by area? For example, "for the San Francisco bay area, apple weather is most accurate on rain. But for NYC accuweather is better." I suppose you ought to be comparing weather APIs rather than apps but it would be most usable if you just knew which app to download.
Why is everyone blaming Apple? Your anger should be directed at the authors, who sold their proprietary software and reaped the benefits. This is the dream of most startup entrepreneurs. I'm sure they are quite happy about what happened.
(2023)
Discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35263115
I've been using Klara for years, I especially like the detailed daily forecast that shows hourly weather.
I used to love Dark Sky on android. Finally settled on a using a combination of Breezy Weather and Flowx
So why not replicate it?
Dark Sky is basically just fancy visualization for csv/json data from a weather API.