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Apple acquires Dark Sky

blog.darksky.net

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Re: Apple acquires Dark Sky

#251

Post by [deleted] »

reaperducer wrote: post #239
minimalist wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

"If you are in a densely-populated area of the United States..." Your blanket statement doesn't always hold. This is more accurate.

[deleted]

Re: Apple acquires Dark Sky

#252

Post by jdminhbg »

atonse wrote: post #212
adambyrtek wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not only that, but presumably if Dark Sky becomes the base for the iOS default Weather app, then there won't be a DS standalone iOS app. So they wouldn't just be maintaining a port, it would be an entire Android app with no iOS equivalent.

Re: Apple acquires Dark Sky

#253

Post by _delirium »

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 ?

NWS doesn't do regular daily/hourly forecasts beyond a week, but they do publish "extended range outlooks" which provide probabilities for precipitation and temperature in the 6-10 day and 8-14 day range. Pretty low-res in both temporal and geographical resolution, though, due to the uncertainties: https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/forecasts/extended_ra...

You could also use the NOAA's global weather simulations, some of which go out to 16 days: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/model-data/model-datas...

Re: Apple acquires Dark Sky

#254

Post by WWLink »

jamesgeck0 wrote: post #40

This makes it sounds like the forecast won't be available on the website after this summer? Actually kind of annoyed about this; it was great on desktop, and a nice sort of demo version of the full app on mobile.

Cue the Blizzard Doom guy saying "Do you guys not have phones?" as if that'd get us to stop using our grandpa boxes.

I'm not sure what's so terrible about a website that they're desperate to drop development on it. My guess is that juicy analytics data they get from the mobile app.

Edit: Except of course, Apple was the one buying. So what the heck do they stand to gain by killing the website?

Re: Apple acquires Dark Sky

#255

Post by PaulHoule »

clairity wrote: post #146
notthemessiah wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. When Edwin Howard Armstrong invented FM radio, he was working for RCA, which had everything invested in AM radio, an incompatible technology. RCA chose not to invest, and used their political clout to lobby the FCC to cripple FM radio, and the…

> "...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…

Who needs the weather channel when we have the national weather service publishing forecasts on a 1km x 1km grid?

Is the value of the weather channel that investors expect the national weather service to be abolished?

Re: Apple acquires Dark Sky

#256

Post by minimalist »

reaperducer wrote: post #239
minimalist wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

"If you are in a densely-populated area of the United States..." Your blanket statement doesn't always hold. This is more accurate.

I'm not sure, NWS does a good job of interpolating for regions without a weather station, even taking into account coastal effects and elevation. In my experience (in a rural, montane environment) it works pretty well if you specify your coordinates, not just the zipcode.

Have there any been any comparisons of the commercial services to NWS? That would be an interesting casual study.

Edit: There are some additional interesting comments downthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22740480

Re: Apple acquires Dark Sky

#257

Post by sudosysgen »

jaywalk wrote: post #131
dmos62 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's important to acknowledge that there is a benefit: Apple products' value increases in relation to other platforms' when they introduce more exclusive offerings. The right to do this without repercussions is hurting IT. Big IT business is rife with anti-competitive crap that noone should put up with.

You really think Apple (or anyone else) should be forced to support software on a competing platform? That's absurd. It's a crappy decision on their part, no doubt. But saying it should be illegal is way out of line.

I actually don't think it should be legal for a platform to buy software and then remove it from a competing platform. It's incredibly anti-competitive.

If they made their own software and didn't put it on Android, sure. But this isn't it.

Re: Apple acquires Dark Sky

#258

Post by ThomPete »

Are there competitors to DarkSky out there? One of my startups is looking for hyper-local real-time weather forecasting and unless they keep things running as usual then we would probably need to find someone else.

Re: Apple acquires Dark Sky

#259

Post by Barrin92 »

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…

It's literally bonkers to me how many people sell out. Is the VLC guy the only person with some integrity? Can we not be satisfied with the money we make from subscribers instead of selling everything including the kitchen sink to some corporate behemoth to swallow it up and kill every open service?

The same thing is happening in the podcasting ecosystem right now. it's turning more and more into a walled garden.

Re: Apple acquires Dark Sky

#260

Post by aequitas »

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…

My dad owns a base station that uploads data to WU and since the takeover I've not been able to get a proper API key to have him pull his own data from the WU API.

Luckily the base station is easy to scrape for the raw data locally, but still.

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