I have an (unpopular) iOS app that consumes the Dark Sky API. Recently it hit number 7 in the weather category, despite only having had 2 downloads in the previous 23 days. I thought that was rather peculiar at the time and wondered if Apple had intervened somehow, for some reason I couldn't understand.
Apple acquires Dark Sky
551–560 of 594 posts
Re: Apple acquires Dark Sky
#552Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you move from apples to googles? At least Apple pretends to care about privacy.
We talk about privacy as an absolute but privacy from whom? I'm mostly concerned about the government getting and abusing my data and if I use iCloud backups all my data is right there for them to take. With Google's activity controls I feel like I have more control over what they're storing. That said I do wish there was a third option besides Apple and Google.
maybe in 10 years pine or purism will have usable phones.
Re: Apple acquires Dark Sky
#553Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I ended up having to use an Apple device temporarily after my previous phone died. While there are things I really enjoy about Apple, the lack of choice is a dealbreaker for me. I can't buy a kindle book through the app on my device, because iBooks. Added: Ended up back on an Android device pretty quickly.
> because iBooks
It's not because of iBooks, it's because Amazon would have to pay 30% to Apple if they sold through the app.
Re: Apple acquires Dark Sky
#554Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple is a services company now according to them, and as demonstrated by the Apple tv app on my Samsung TV.
Services != Advertisement. Advertisement is about collecting data from potential customers and offering that to advertisers. Services in the context of Apple is about selling the hardware hoping to capitalize on the ecosystem of their services (music, news, icloud, etc). In extreme cases such as Sony who sells PlayStations ("hardware") at a loss hoping to recover it from game sales ("services"). Apple is more like So…
There is still a few years to go by for Apple's service bucks to surpass the hardware bucks, while Sony (the gaming division) is loosing money on hardware.
Re: Apple acquires Dark Sky
#555Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's because Google is an ad company while Apple is a hardware company.
Apple is a services company now according to them, and as demonstrated by the Apple tv app on my Samsung TV.
not really, because iphones have ridiculous huge profit margins. Apple services earnings is not even close to iphone selling earnings. But one does boost the other so that's what they are doing. But there is still a few years to go by for Apple's service bucks to surpass the hardware bucks.
Re: Apple acquires Dark Sky
#556Earlier quoted context omitted.
This could in a sense be viewed as a form of bundling ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundling_(antitrust_law) ) where the services being bundled are the OS and the weather app.
The problem is that bundling is only considered problematic if your product is in a monopoly position. Bundling Internet Explorer was problematic for Windows because Windows was considered to have a monopoly in the OS market.
That depends on the interpretation, which differs by jurisdiction.
The EU, for example, aims its anti-competitive regulation towards firms who have a "dominant market position" rather than a "monopoly".
Re: Apple acquires Dark Sky
#557Sigh. 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…
Just like Maps, weather is a must have app so Apple is trying to do it in house. IMO, that's all there is with this move.
Re: Apple acquires Dark Sky
#558Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, that's the classic "it's been a wonderful journey" scenario where the whole product is sunset, but shutting down just a single platform is not as obvious.
One could easily argue that Apple is sunsetting the Android app for one of the same reasons we can't install MacOS on a non-Apple PC (without violating the EULA): Apple doesn't like supporting unpredictable platforms, and doesn't want to be in a situation where people blame them for other people's bugs and unexpected under-the-hood changes.
Do you really believe that Apple doesn't allow macOS on PCs because of "unpredictability"? I think it's pretty obvious by now that bundling is a great way to differentiate their hardware, charge a premium, and lock users in their ecosystem. Remember the people who complained about issues with the butterfly keyboard, but kept buying Macbooks just because of macOS?
Re: Apple acquires Dark Sky
#559Earlier quoted context omitted.
The historical weather data is very unique! Everybody is talking about forecasts, damn, I use Dark Sky to look back in the time. They aggregated this data from a lot of sources over a very large time span and with very good coverage. Nothing can compare to this. Nothing I know about..
Why would you need to look at historical data? I'm sure other places provide it as well; it's available in the web-interface of AccuWeather and many other services, too, for example.
AccuWeather provides only data for the day before. That is not very historical.
I need to fetch data from years in the past to assign it to dated assets.
Re: Apple acquires Dark Sky
#560Earlier quoted context omitted.
> whereas Apple was pulling data from The Weather Company, now part of IBM. It's turtles all the way down[1]. The Weather Company also leverages NOAA data and is listed as such as a weather service provider on NOAA's site[2]. Although they ostensibly augment it with other sources and apply their own forecasting models to the data, they're still basically repackaging NOAA data in one form or another. [1] https://en.wi…
> The Weather Company also leverages NOAA data ... in the USA. But one of its great advantages is the data it receives from tens of thousands of amateur weather reporting stations globally. The Wunderground forecast for our locality is hyper-localised and very accurate for that reason, particularly compared to the national Met Office forecast which applies to an airport 35 miles away, beside a lake and on the other s…
I was an early supporter (and payer) for Wunderground, but now they have turned into another IBM money grab and I refuse to have anything to do with them now.