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Dark Sky Has a New Home (2020)

blog.darksky.net

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Re: Dark Sky Has a New Home (2020)

#11

Post by danpalmer »

What's the play with Dark Sky and their API?

Apple just launched the Weather API, and it's just Dark Sky rebranded, and slightly cheaper pricing. But why?

I had expected either:

- No location permissions needed to get basic weather data, to reduce location permission use by apps when it's only for weather.

- Free weather API to lock in developers on Apple platforms.

Re: Dark Sky Has a New Home (2020)

#12

Post by danpalmer »

resters wrote: post #6

I am using both apps and Dark Sky still has a much more micro level forecast and is much more accurate than Apple Weather.

It makes sense that they'd offer a basic weather app that's suitable for 80% of the market, and then let third-party devs fill in the niches for the rest.

Re: Dark Sky Has a New Home (2020)

#15

Post by spqr0a1 »

These days I use the "hourly graphical forecast" from the National Weather Service. I've found it to be at least as accurate as Dark Sky and easy enough to display 3 images side by side and refresh periodically to always have a 6-day forecast at hand. The display is more informative and compact than any other weather site or app I've tried. There's also a tabular version that's easy enough to scrape if you want to customize it.

As an example, here's the forecast for zip code 12345: https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=42.8099&lon=-7...

Re: Dark Sky Has a New Home (2020)

#16

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

irthomasthomas wrote: post #8

I rely on a awesome android app[0] for my photography, it's just a big table of data like Low, Med, High cloud cover, which you can use to predict sunsets/rises. It uses the Dark Sky api. Will android apps be allowed continued access to this API? If not, I'm screwed. Unless anyone knows another source for this type of detailed weather data? [0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.firstlight...

According to the article:

> The Dark Sky API and website will continue to function until March 31st, 2023.

So your app has that long.

Re: Dark Sky Has a New Home (2020)

#18

Post by Larrikin »

mdrzn wrote: post #13

All and every weather data that ANY weather company uses is provided, for free, by the US Government [0] [0] https://www.weather.gov/

Dark Sky augmented their data with user reports and sensor data inside of the phones. There was a time during the summer of 2019 where I was able to impress friends by accurately predicting when rain would start and stop down to the minute based on the rain notifications I would get.

When Apple bought them and shut down the Android app they threw away all the data Android users were giving them and Dark Sky became almost exactly the same as every other weather API.

Re: Dark Sky Has a New Home (2020)

#20

Post by joekrill »

danpalmer wrote: post #11

What's the play with Dark Sky and their API? Apple just launched the Weather API, and it's just Dark Sky rebranded, and slightly cheaper pricing. But why? I had expected either: - No location permissions needed to get basic weather data, to reduce location permission use by apps when it's only for weather. - Free weather API to lock in developers on Apple platforms.

I'm wondering the same thing. I was surprised they even released a public API. I thought for sure it would be limited to iOS/macOS apps only. It does require a developers account now - which means an upfront cost for anyone who isn't in the Developer program. And the pricing tiers aren't as friendly as before. But the free tier is much higher now (500,000 now vs 31,000 with DarkSky). Hopefully they don't jack the price up in the future.

> No location permissions needed to get basic weather data, to reduce location permission use by apps when it's only for weather.

This seems tricky. The response currently returns the latitude/longitude, so it could be a possible way for an app to get around requiring location permissions. Even if they excluded that, there are other data points that could probably help narrow things down, particularly when there is an active weather alert, because those tend to specify locations.

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