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Apple acquires Dark Sky

blog.darksky.net

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Re: Apple acquires Dark Sky

#511

Post by Razengan »

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…

Oh boy.

A lot of stuff known as quintessentially Apple today was bought by them; Siri, Logic, Final Cut, as well as tech like Face ID and soon AR.

Re: Apple acquires Dark Sky

#512

Post by starpilot »

crazygringo wrote: post #497
starpilot wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 so…

Really recommend reading http://jackadam.github.io/2011/how-dark-sky-works/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_radar#How_a_weather_ra... to get something of a handle on it

For one thing, the resolution of radar is finite where one "pixel" (gate) is quite large, and everything under it is assumed to be constant. Precipitation at a spot on the ground is the result of everything happening from sea level up 40,000', and we don't have exact properties (temperature, dew point, humidity) for the atmosphere at all of those locations. We can fill in some gaps with models on supercomputers, but they're just models.

Re: Apple acquires Dark Sky

#513

Post by root_axis »

I can't help but feel like the character of this thread would have been much more severe if it were google shutting out all iOS users from one of their services. I do see a lot of ticked off android customers but a surprising lack of "break up these big companies" rhetoric.

Re: Apple acquires Dark Sky

#514

Post by sunflowerfly »

sandyarmstrong wrote: post #126
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…

I cannot begin to say how much IBM ruined Weather Underground. The app was _perfect_! I was thrilled to pay for it. Now it's probably the worst app on my phone and I should just delete it. It takes forever to start, more than half the time it loads no data, and even if it is loaded the UI redesign has made the whole thing slow and useless. Would love suggestions for another app on Android.

I would gladly pay money for a weather app that was nothing but their line graph. It was so simple and clean. I often took screenshots and shared with friends. The new version is useless, but I cannot find a replacement.

Re: Apple acquires Dark Sky

#515

Post by cosmie »

mattmcknight wrote: post #442
sbahr001 wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might have to do with AccuWeather trying to make weather data harder to access, especially NOAA data. Dark Sky was one of the best API's for weather data too, and now Apple does not have to follow anyone else's rules. Tim Cook's big push for environmental responsibility can also be a reason for the acquisition as well. Having access to this type of data allows them to open the door to more environmental production…

Apparently DarkSky does use the NOAA data, whereas Apple was pulling data from The Weather Company, now part of IBM. "IBM purchased the Weather Co. in 2016 and sells weather data to, among others, Apple, for its weather app. The purchase could signal that Apple will develop its own weather model rather than continue to use IBM-derived data, or it may indicate that Apple, too, liked the design of the app." https://www…

> 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.wikiquote.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down

[2] https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/success/weather-service-providers

Re: Apple acquires Dark Sky

#516

Post by saym »

beart wrote: post #367
DiabloD3 wrote: post #94

As an Android user that uses Dark Sky: Fuck you. Everyone else is congratulating the team on a job well done, I'm not. I rely on Dark Sky because there are no better services, and it is a service I pay for. Now I'm going to have to switch to some second rate weather app that can't predict the weather worth a damn because it just regurgitates the NWS. God fucking damnit.

yes I agree. It may sound extreme but this small decision has actually turned me off from ever purchasing an apple product again (I do own an iPhone now but don't frequently use it. There is just no consumer friendly reason possible to shut the Android app off.

Especially because it's not the default weather app on any Android device. Users have to seek it out. They're not punishing every android user, just the ones that have already supported the application they've purchased.

It's spiteful.

Re: Apple acquires Dark Sky

#517

Post by rckclmbr »

srhngpr wrote: post #417
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…

I've been using Overdrop [0] for a few months now. Has great widgets and can select from a few different sources for the weather data too. [0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=widget.dd.com....

it says "powered by dark sky", so since they are shutting down the api, wont this app likely stop working soon?

Re: Apple acquires Dark Sky

#518

Post by squaresmile »

djrogers wrote: post #508
freedomben wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weather Timeline used to be awesome, but it used Dark Sky APIs and got shut down during this whole Apple acquisition thing. The app got acquired by MyRadar and they say it will be back using the MyRadar APIs, but will probably never be as good without the Dark Sky data behind it.

> Weather Timeline used to be awesome, but it used Dark Sky APIs and got shut down during this whole Apple acquisition thing. What? Was it shut down by the ‘acquisition thing’ that was announced today, or the API that Apple will be supporting for the next 18 months? I think you’re drawing conclusions not supported by anything.

His timeline is messed up. A year ago, Weather Timeline got pulled from the app store because sales wasn't covering the API cost. After a month or two, it got sold to the company that made MyRadar.

https://www.reddit.com/r/androidapps/comments/9gti4r/rip_wea...

https://www.androidauthority.com/weather-timeline-android-ne...

Re: Apple acquires Dark Sky

#519

Post by dingaling »

cosmie wrote: post #515
mattmcknight wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently DarkSky does use the NOAA data, whereas Apple was pulling data from The Weather Company, now part of IBM. "IBM purchased the Weather Co. in 2016 and sells weather data to, among others, Apple, for its weather app. The purchase could signal that Apple will develop its own weather model rather than continue to use IBM-derived data, or it may indicate that Apple, too, liked the design of the app." https://www…

> 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 side of mountains.

Re: Apple acquires Dark Sky

#520

Post by michaelmrose »

latexr wrote: post #384
Traster wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Is this acquisition going to give more people access to a great weather app or less people access to a great weather app? Perhaps more. It’s a matter of comparing all users of Dark Sky, including via the API and on Android, against the user base of iOS. And perhaps they’ll be able to use the technology in other countries, bringing in more users than Dark Sky ever could.

Is it realy important that a greater number of people may someday use it in the medium term when in the short term there are less actual users and in the long term the potential is again less.

>And perhaps they’ll be able to use the technology in other countries, bringing in more users than Dark Sky ever could.

45% of ios users are well off Americans. Outside of the US 90% of phones are Android who won't be able to use it anymore.

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