61–70 of 313 posts
A platform buying up cross-platform apps and making them uni-platform really should be slam dunk anti-trust. It's obviously anti-consumer and concentration of market power.
It's a weather app. There is no monopoly on weather info. The data is pretty much public and anyone could start their own alternative.
I had home automation based on Dark Sky API. Sad to see it go. (mental note: make sure there are always alternate solutions and manual over-rides for external resources.)
What weather app are people using on Android? I'm currently using Geometric Weather + MyRadar: https://f-droid.org/packages/wangdaye.com.geometricweather/ https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.acmeaom.an...
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.foreca.and...
I’ve used this app for years. I will have to check out the new iOS weather app. Honestly the Dark Sky rain predictions are usually wrong more often than not. I use it to monitor rain to keep my zoysia nice, but it has been disappointing me recently.
The predictions used to be dead on. it was crazy weird how accurate. But shortly after apple purchased they started slipping. Now rarely accurate.
Before COVID / Apple's acquisition, I had a 10 minute bike ride from my place of work to where I lived. I could use the hyper-local predictions to stay out of the rain, and it almost never failed me.
Either way, because the install base sensors powered predictions, I suspect the acquisition is what killed its utility. I can't count on the accuracy any more.
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It definitely does not have the same functionality, you can only see the current temp/precip prob %/humidity/dewpoint/wind speed/etc, you can’t see the forecasted stats I listed in the iOS weather app, you can only get hour by hour temperature. I’m very disappointed that Dark Sky is going away. If Apple added in the ability to see forecasted hour by hour wind speed/humidity/dew point/etc, it’d be a decent replacement…
> I’m very disappointed that Dark Sky is going away. If Apple added in the ability to see forecasted hour by hour wind speed/humidity/dew point/etc, it’d be a decent replacement. In iOS 16 (and in macOS Ventura, which adds the Weather app), you can view hourly temperature, UV index, wind speed, precipitation, feels like, humidity, visibility, and pressure, on a graph. You can also tap and hold to view individual hour…
I am a long-ago purchaser of Dark Sky. I find I never use it on my iPhone. Carrot Weather is always superior in both the forecast and Radar. Dark Sky's "it will rain in 5 minutes" was hit or miss. I live in the mountains, so perhaps, Dark Sky works well in a less difficult environment. That said, if it disappears tomorrow, I won't miss it.
Carrot is a great app. However, it's expensive and massively overkill for people living in the Bay Area. $40 a year for a warning the 10 times a year it rains is a bit much. Still, until iPadOS 16 brought a native weather app, Carrot was the best alternative for using the same app across all my devices (Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch). I'm glad the built in Weather app is sufficiently good that I can drop that subscr…
MyRadar is the best weather radar app I’ve found and once little league season starts it’s an essential.
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It's a weather app. There is no monopoly on weather info. The data is pretty much public and anyone could start their own alternative.
I believe the point of Dark Sky was that they used air-pressure sensor data from the phones they were installed on. That was the secret sauce that (used to) power their hyper-local forecasts.
They claimed something about barometer data but I don't honestly believe that they used it to improve their forecasts. I worked on this problem at different companies for many years, and with academia, and found it to be quite difficult. Possible, doable, but very difficult to demonstrate actual improvement. Significant academic work was done after Dark Sky made their claim, and the papers published used ensemble kalman filters among other on-device data-cleaning techniques that I do not believe Dark Sky implemented. So I doubt their barometer claims.
I'm bummed about this. I've used the two side-by-side since I learned about this, and it seems like Dark Sky gives far richer detail. In fact, sometimes, I've noticed that Dark Sky will accurately predict rain when Apple Weather doesn't. (I haven't ever noticed the reverse.)
https://weather-dj.netlify.app/
Let's hope that in the future Apple continues to deliver the same API structure as Dark Sky did, because it will be a big shame if they did some changes or limitations to it. Although I only use this app mostly for my personal use, the effort that I've put into this would be for nothing's worth.
Upsetting about the app, but the new iOS weather app has the functionality essentially. The real gut wrencher is the darksky website going down. It’s how I check weather most of the time a no other browser weather site comes close to it in simplicity and features.
>Weather apps are secretly selling your location data to the highest bidder
https://thenextweb.com/news/weather-apps-are-secretly-sellin...