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Apple acquires Dark Sky

blog.darksky.net

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Re: Apple acquires Dark Sky

#491

Post by briandear »

Traster wrote: post #366
threeseed wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For companies like Apple, these acquisitions are more about killing competition This is just nonsense. Every acquisition they've ever done can directly be seen in future projects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio... The products you don't see give a hint into their roadmap.

Is this acquisition going to give more people access to a great weather app or less people access to a great weather app? It's going to be the same people, working on the same product, but now, it's going to unavailable via their cheif competitor. Tell me how on earth you can consider that not killing competition.

What’s stopping someone from now making a truly great Android weather app? If anything it allows for more competition.

Re: Apple acquires Dark Sky

#492

Post by ivirshup »

crazygringo wrote: post #400
girzel wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly what I found it didn't work for. I live in Seattle, and basically gave up on it (with today's news, I'll uninstall it from my Android phone). I could look out the window at steady rain, and Dark Sky would still be telling me it was going to be clear all day. Like that more often than not.

That's bizarre but actually can't be Dark Sky's fault. Switch to radar view in the app and it will show you the exact geographical distribution of rain in your city right now. This comes from national weather data. If that's inaccurate then something is wrong with the government data. Or maybe Seattle rain is somehow much patchier at a finer level than government data is able to resolve? FWIW in New York City its ass…

This was my experience too. Perfect in Boston, recently great in Singapore, pretty much useless in Melbourne.

I’d like to know more about their modeling. How much do they need to specialize on region for accurate prediction or data collection? Are varying prediction qualities based on different climates, or is it from bias in data collection?

Re: Apple acquires Dark Sky

#494

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #321
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

By shenanigans, do you perhaps mean the rigorous testing regime applied to a device which will literally be putting the air in your lungs while you're unconscious?? I for one am super happy that people with this attitude have been totally unable to penetrate the medical devices field!

You might want to read about the sort of malfeasance that has put us in this situation:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/29/business/coronavirus-us-v...

TLDR: A $3000 ventilator was “on schedule to file for market approval in September 2013” and then Covidien bought out the competition to prevent it coming to fruition.

Re: Apple acquires Dark Sky

#495

Post by brianzelip »

notthemessiah wrote: post #52
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. 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…

For more on the origins of FM and other related tech, see _The Network: The Battle for the Airwaves and the Birth of the Communications Age_, Woolley and Hoye, 2016, https://www.worldcat.org/title/network-the-battle-for-the-ai...

Re: Apple acquires Dark Sky

#496

Post by simonmales »

The first version of Dark Sky was web application called forecast.io. This sparked an interest in me that web apps can be beautiful and to the ordinary user, look like an "app".

I feel they were one of the early adopters of the "PWA" mindset, before the term was coined. Great blog post from 2013: It’s not a web app. It’s an app you install from the web. https://web.archive.org/web/20161221014014/https://blog.dark...

Secondly DuckDuckGo uses Dark Sky for its own weather information. I wonder what the alternative will be now.

Re: Apple acquires Dark Sky

#497

Post by crazygringo »

starpilot wrote: post #416
crazygringo wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's bizarre but actually can't be Dark Sky's fault. Switch to radar view in the app and it will show you the exact geographical distribution of rain in your city right now. This comes from national weather data. If that's inaccurate then something is wrong with the government data. Or maybe Seattle rain is somehow much patchier at a finer level than government data is able to resolve? FWIW in New York City its ass…

Radar data is hugely noisy and it can be difficult to suss out what is cloud cover with no precipitation, or what is precipitation, plus filtering out biomass and dust. All of these show up as radar returns. There can be shadowing. Dark Sky does its own pre-processing/denoising of radar and so that can lead to different results from NOAA.

Ah that's really interesting, thanks for the info.

I'm curious then what users see in Seattle when it's raining out the window but the Dark Sky radar maps says it isn't.

Are there swiss-cheese holes that are obvious processing artifacts? Is the whole city somehow below some threshold so it doesn't show rain anywhere? Are there patterns of extreme local variation in rain that get mistaken for noise and deleted?

The solution is not necessarily simple, but identifying the culprit should be fairly obvious, no?

Re: Apple acquires Dark Sky

#498

Post by KiDD »

nitrogen wrote: post #421
threeseed wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For companies like Apple, these acquisitions are more about killing competition This is just nonsense. Every acquisition they've ever done can directly be seen in future projects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio... The products you don't see give a hint into their roadmap.

Where can I buy a Primesense-based USB RGBZ camera these days?

FaceID uses this technology?

Re: Apple acquires Dark Sky

#499

Post by balladeer »

cageface wrote: post #376
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…

Apple's walled garden is more and more a shiny cage. Vote with your dollars and support more open alternatives. I switched to a Note 10 recently after using iPhones for years and I'm really enjoying the overall experience and the flexibility to do many things with my hardware that Apple feels I shouldn't be allowed to do.

At this point the only two things that are stopping me from leaving Apple:

- The hope that iPhone 9 will not be a gigantic phone and it might actually be around the size of SE.

- There's nowhere to go to. Can't go back to generic Android. That's just a non-starter. There are no OEMs who supports a privacy focussed Android ROM and sends "timely" patches and OS upgrades (there are some niche ones but they will either never start direct service/support in my country or in a decade maybe).

Re: Apple acquires Dark Sky

#500

Post by root_axis »

simonh wrote: post #375
JeremyNT wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sigh is right. I used and paid for dark sky on Android, and now it's dead. This is one way Apple tries to lock people in, and it's really frustrating. This isn't an efficient market situation, this is a monopolist protecting their walled garden kingdom by slurping up the cross platform innovators. I'm terribly disappointed in the Dark Sky authors for doing this to long time loyal customers, no matter what their paych…

How is iOS in any way, shape or form a monopoly?

Monopolies aren't the issue, anti-competive behavior is. Buying out a company and then shutting out your competitor's customers is pretty anti-competetive and also clearly bad for consumers.
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