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Apple acquires Dark Sky

blog.darksky.net

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Re: Apple acquires Dark Sky

#221

Post by wrycoder »

k9quaint wrote: post #186
untog wrote: post #4

Sigh. I mean, congratulations to the founders of Dark Sky. It’s a wonderful app and they deserve all the money they’ll get from this and they deserve a lot of credit for not selling user data when almost every other weather app does. But shutting down the API and Android apps feels like an egregious move by Apple. And I hope we actually see a good improvement to the Apple weather app as a result of this. I remember a…

Crap. I liked Dark Sky. I actually downloaded it because Apple Weather predicted 50 degrees F and it turned out to be 30degrees F with another 30 windchill. Grats Dark Sky founders.

It keeps greeting me every morning with the weather in Cupertino, though I’m three thousand miles away. It seems it forgets my location every upgrade.

Re: Apple acquires Dark Sky

#222

Post by [deleted] »

fooey wrote: post #138
realityking wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know. How's Dark Sky competing with Apple? I don't think they derive much, if any, revenue from the Weather app. More likely they're paying for the data.

Maybe this is the start of the Epic Games business model. Buy things and make them exclusive just so no one else can have them.

[deleted]

Re: Apple acquires Dark Sky

#223

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

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.

Use the native Android weather app hidden in the widgets.

Re: Apple acquires Dark Sky

#224

Post by thinkloop »

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…

> This drove Armstrong to suicide by defenestration

For those who are extra slow like me: he killed himself by jumping out of a window.

Re: Apple acquires Dark Sky

#225

Post by TacticalTable »

fralewsmi wrote: post #213
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

Which ruins it for a large portion of the userbase. Do you have a good product if it only runs on a Nokia NGage? It's a grey area

Re: Apple acquires Dark Sky

#226

Post by poooogles »

dashundchen wrote: post #156
untog wrote: post #4

Sigh. I mean, congratulations to the founders of Dark Sky. It’s a wonderful app and they deserve all the money they’ll get from this and they deserve a lot of credit for not selling user data when almost every other weather app does. But shutting down the API and Android apps feels like an egregious move by Apple. And I hope we actually see a good improvement to the Apple weather app as a result of this. I remember a…

> I remember a few years ago Apple bought a fantastic public transit app (Embark?), shut it down and I still don’t think their Maps app comes close to the original transit app. Semi-related but for transit apps, I much prefer the dedicated "Transit" app over any of the mapping services. https://transitapp.com/ It has great visualizations of nearby lines and departures, gives bike/walk/taxi alternative times, allows y…

>Semi-related but for transit apps, I much prefer the dedicated "Transit" app over any of the mapping services.

Have you tried Citymapper? It looks pretty similar in features and covers a different set of cities (there's some crossover but not as much as I'd of thought), might be useful.

Re: Apple acquires Dark Sky

#227

Post by andrewla »

I hope that someday we will have an anti-trust regime that scrutinizes this kind of thing more carefully.

One of the main things I liked about Dark Sky was that they charged for their app. They were good, people knew they were good and paid for it, so they had a business model other than acquisition.

I guess there goes that. Wunderground was completely crippled after their acquisition by the weather channel and became a useless heap of junk; looks like it's Dark Sky's turn. Weather Underground was a great resource, but they never got a funding model that really worked; their subscription-based "ad removal" didn't really work for me.

Re: Apple acquires Dark Sky

#228

Post by eli »

nxc18 wrote: post #147
eli wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the same as the existing Weather app?

Weather app is not impossible to remove and hasn't been for a long time. source: I just deleted mine

Is there any reason to think a Dark Sky powered Apple Weather app will work differently?

Re: Apple acquires Dark Sky

#229

Post by gbear605 »

rsync wrote: post #195
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…

"IBM bought the Weather Underground app and ruined it ..." I never used the WU app, but I do use the WU website regularly and feel that it is very slow and spammy and bad UI, etc., etc. The problem is, I cannot find anyone else to give me a 10 day forecast . How can I tease out a 10-day forecast from weather.gov ?

My understanding is that 10 day forecasts just aren’t accurate enough to really mean anything, so most weather sources don’t publish them.

Re: Apple acquires Dark Sky

#230

Post by tim58 »

capableweb wrote: post #177
3JPLW wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this anecdote at all analogous? I'm not seeing it.

It's in general putting Apple to like with the company and finishes with the statement: > For companies like Apple, these acquisitions are more about killing competition than they are about improving their own services or user interfaces You definitely see this with not just Apple but any big tech company. Either they acquire a company for their tech, for their people who work there (talent), for their data or finall…

> Either they acquire a company for their tech, for their people who work there (talent), for their data or finally, just to be able to kill their company/product.

To make the list more complete I've seen large tech companies acquire another tech company for their users and/or their brand. Think about Microsoft buying Github or Skype.

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