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Apple acquires Dark Sky

blog.darksky.net

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Re: Apple acquires Dark Sky

#211

Post by clairity »

Someone wrote: post #176
clairity wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "...suicide by defenestration..." as an aside, my first thought at this phrase was that "he died by removing all the windows ?" it took a second to process that properly. but to the point, that's the kind of anti-competition we need to root out quickly. compete on merits, not on demerits. i'm sad about the embark app, but i'm hoping that the dark sky integration means no more sending data (however "anonymized") to…

For those who wonder: it’s not a neologism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defenestrations_of_Prague : The Defenestrations of Prague (Czech: Pražská defenestrace, German: Prager Fenstersturz, Latin: Defenestratio Pragensis) were three incidents in the history of Bohemia in which multiple people were defenestrated (thrown out of a window). The origin of the word "defenestrate" ("out of the window") is believed to come…

yes, mine was more a temporary confusion between the common notion of the "de-" prefix in english (~"remove") vs. latin (~"out of").

Re: Apple acquires Dark Sky

#212

Post by atonse »

adambyrtek wrote: post #84
atonse wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We may not agree (and I don't agree with Apple's move here) but it's hardly surprising that they would shut it down for their direct competitor platform.

Let's not forget that it is/was a paid subscription on Android, so offering it for free on iOS and keeping paid on Android would still give them a significant edge. Somebody else in this thread mentioned that Shazam is still available on Android even after the acquisition, so it's definitely not as obvious as you suggest.

Correct, and Apple Music and Apple TV are available on all platforms too. But both bring tens of millions of paid subscribers.

While I don't know what Dark Sky's paid base is, it's probably way smaller than that.

Re: Apple acquires Dark Sky

#213

Post by fralewsmi »

kyledrake wrote: post #33

> Android and Wear OS App > The app will no longer be available for download. Service to existing users and subscribers will continue until July 1, 2020, at which point the app will be shut down. Subscribers who are still active at that time will receive a refund. IBM bought the Weather Underground app and ruined it, and now Dark Sky was bought by Apple and they're ruining that too. Now I will have zero good weather…

They're not ruining it, they're just not making their product available on a competitor device

Re: Apple acquires Dark Sky

#214

Post by askafriend »

rrix2 wrote: post #163
nxc18 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its very hard to maintain an Android app to the same quality that people expect from Apple. I can see why they'd want to shrink that headcount or redirect to a more productive endeavor. As a bonus, Apple devices get a better weather app than the competition. The API part doesn't make as much sense, since they could make a pretty penny reselling that data without as much support burden.

apple has 100 billion dollars in the bank, funding a world-class android team should be possible if not desirable for them as they transform more and more in to a services company

It's not about money. It's about focus.

It's tempting to think you can just throw money at something and make it work. Unfortunately that's not how you build something great.

Re: Apple acquires Dark Sky

#215

Post by jazzyjackson »

joncp wrote: post #63

Let's not forget that, at least in the US, weather data is publicly funded and excellent forecasts are available at a very granular level. For example, here's the weather at Apple Park: https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lon=-122.009263237... ... And here's the graph for up-to-the-minute detail: https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=37.3367&lon=-1... It ain't pretty, but it works and you've already pai…

I was about to ask if anyone knows a decent API to build my own product off of, and I found out weather.gov has an API available without requiring a key for now, they just ask that you include contact information in your user agent so they don't accidentally block you.

https://www.weather.gov/documentation/services-web-api

Re: Apple acquires Dark Sky

#216

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

rapind wrote: post #190
clairity wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "...suicide by defenestration..." as an aside, my first thought at this phrase was that "he died by removing all the windows ?" it took a second to process that properly. but to the point, that's the kind of anti-competition we need to root out quickly. compete on merits, not on demerits. i'm sad about the embark app, but i'm hoping that the dark sky integration means no more sending data (however "anonymized") to…

This is a systematic problem with crony capitalism. It will always be with us so long as lobbying and corporate campaign donations are a thing.

Fingers crossed that all the shenanigans preventing cheap ventilators coming to market will force some regulatory action.

Re: Apple acquires Dark Sky

#217

Post by [deleted] »

crazygringo wrote: post #46

On the one hand, I'm very happy that Dark Sky functionality will presumably become integrated with iOS's weather app. I love Dark Sky and have always found it weird I have to use 2 different weather apps. (And I'm happy for the founders for their $$$.) On the other hand, I feel for Android/web users. Totally sucks to lose it. Perhaps it will push Google to build similar functionality into the stock Android weather ap…

[deleted]

Re: Apple acquires Dark Sky

#218

Post by minimalist »

sandyarmstrong wrote: post #126
kyledrake wrote: post #33

> Android and Wear OS App > The app will no longer be available for download. Service to existing users and subscribers will continue until July 1, 2020, at which point the app will be shut down. Subscribers who are still active at that time will receive a refund. IBM bought the Weather Underground app and ruined it, and now Dark Sky was bought by Apple and they're ruining that too. Now I will have zero good weather…

I cannot begin to say how much IBM ruined Weather Underground. The app was _perfect_! I was thrilled to pay for it. Now it's probably the worst app on my phone and I should just delete it. It takes forever to start, more than half the time it loads no data, and even if it is loaded the UI redesign has made the whole thing slow and useless. Would love suggestions for another app on Android.

Restating a comment from about a year ago[0]:

If you are in the United States, nothing beats getting the forecast straight from the horses mouth (NWS that is). Some companies are notorious for producing 30+ day forecasts, which can't have any meaningful levels of skill.

NOAA/NWS should just create their own mobile application. I use Wx[1], which parses NWS data directly and can be found on f-droid[2] and g---le play.

Granted, Wx doesn't follow Material Design for Android in the slightest, but I like it that way because it's very information-dense, snappy, and light (unlike r--ct "native" and other JS toolkits out there).

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19775291

[1]: https://gitlab.com/joshua.tee/wx

[2]: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/joshuatee.wx/

Re: Apple acquires Dark Sky

#219

Post by TrueDuality »

maliker wrote: post #132
thisisbrians wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any clue how hard it would be to create an open-source alternative to the DarkSky API? My company needs one, too. Maybe we could band forces and organize an open-source alternative. I know it won't be as good, but I'm curious what other people in our position think...

We'd be interested! I think it will be pretty hard to do well in open source though. Server costs and keeping things working when NOAA (etc.) sources change is probably going to be expensive.

There's no reason a running service couldn't also opensource its back end code. It does provide an avenue for people to tinker, potentially improve, and self-host if they have the resources available or the service itself goes under.

There are also a lot of open projects that distribute the work of handling tweaks to parsers and source lists when the upstreams drift.

Even globally I can't imagine the minutely data from reporting stations everywhere being "big data", maybe in the 10s of gigabytes a day (very rough guess, I haven't looked into this specifically)? I'd still be willing to bet API / web requests dwarf the processing and bandwidth requirements of the raw data for a public service like this.

That probably does put it pretty reasonably in the realm of self-hosting if you put a threshold on how much historical data you want to keep and geofence the region you care about.

Re: Apple acquires Dark Sky

#220

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

floatingatoll wrote: post #192
fooey wrote: post #55

I'm very disappointed to see Apple consume and extinguish a great service.

"Extinguish" assumes they have no intention to replace third-party data harvesters with their own service. Apple currently redirects their platforms' weather data HTTP requests to third-party services like Weather.com, that are known for aggressively marketing and reselling user data as a primary revenue stream. Seems more likely they see this as a way to improve weather data for their customers without seeing their…

They could just get the weather data directly from the national bodies that provide it. It's not like they were hurting for money to staff their own weather division.
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