The feature I miss most about Dark Sky was that it allowed you to visualize changes in dew point throughout the day.
Where I live (US East Coast), the weather can feel dramatically different depending on the humidity. Relative Humidity has always felt to me like a poor way of measuring how humid the weather will feel. For example, 50% RH at 84ºF will feel lightly humid and generally pleasant, whereas 50% RH at at 97ºF will feel like a swamp. The dew points at those respective points - 63ºF and 75ºF - do a much better job at immediately conveying how humid the air will feel.
Dark Sky used to show hourly dew point graphs that you could browse throughout the week and see when the humidity would break (or return). Apple Weather does show you the dew point, but only when you select a point on the RH graph. So to track the dew point over the coming week, you basically need to drag your finger over each day's graph and observe the changing numbers.
I think this is probably just due to the lack of general awareness about how dew point is a more elegant shorthand for "absolute humidity" than any other weather metric currently in use. I hope there will be more of us in the future!
Excellent app! And I'm sure I'm not the only one to congratulate you in showing past weather - a so obviously useful feature that 99% of all weather apps never have.
I too miss the dew point feature. The best replacement for Dark Sky I've found is this 10-day view of Weather Underground that's unfortunately only available on their website—I just bookmark the website on my phone home screen. https://www.wunderground.com/forecast/us/tx/austin/30.27,-97...
> that's unfortunately only available on their website
A very old version of their Android app had that view as a 3-day widget for the home screen. Right after it was bought they did a major upgrade and removed a ton of functionality, that widget included.
For me, I've written myself a Google Apps script - to be more accurate, AI did, but with my interaction - that e-mails a "humidity forecast" as to how wet the next six days are going to feel to me in a simple way. I don't know who came up with the categories I've placed them in - it seemed to be common weather information.
Relative Humidity is directly tied to the dew point. Take a look back at the humidity forecast and look right under the humidity percentage. The dew point is there. If you tap a point in the future on the graph of forecast changes, the dew point is also registered there.
- Relative humidity is also directly tied to the current temperature. (Warmer air can hold more moisture.)
- The dew point is independent from the temperature, so it is effectively a measure of "absolute humidity."
- While both measurements have their advantages, I find dew point a better indicator of the "mugginess." Also it is easier to estimate the relative humidity given the dew point vs. estimate the dew point given the relative humidity.
Yes, but what I'd really like to see is a visual graph of the dew point over the course of a day. The graph currently only shows RH%, and the only way to see how the dew point will change over the course of a day is to drag your finger over the RH% graph and watch the dew point number change.
I'm moving to NYC tomorrow, after spending my entire life on the West Coast.
Thanks for teaching me about dew point (and to the commenters below you for letting me know there's a free Dark Sky clone - merrysky.net - and a dew point graph on Weather Underground)!
Here in Houston as well, dew point is as important as temperature and %PoP. Apple Weather suffices for now but I hope it gets richer with the various types of data that are of greater relevance in different regions.
To put it gently, Apple destroyed a fantastically valuable piece of software and made my life worse. Since then, Apple has failed to come close to offering in their weather app what DarkSky offered for years prior.
Besides the API, besides the hyper-local (and, in my experience, _always_ accurate) forecasts, besides the excellent visualizations, besides the nice web app, what I miss most was the history.
I loved the history. It was perhaps DarkSky's least appreciated feature.
You could search (at least within the US) for any date in the past few decades, and find the temperature and precipitation and whatnot for a given location.
You could see what the weather was like on those important dates in your life. You could see what the weather was like the day after those important dates in your life.
It's a little bit of memory that's been excised from the commons. It still makes me sad.
As a motorcycle rider and someone who goes top-down in my Jeep all summer, the real-time incoming rain alerts of DS were freakishly accurate and I leaned on them constantly. Apple integrated the feature and they became comically inaccurate. (The opposite of an accurate rain forecast is not great.) After getting soaked one too many times, I finally got frustrated enough to chase down the best replacement. Don't love Carrot Weather near as much, but it is the best alternative I've found for heads up on incoming precipitation. Sigh. I still remember the days of getting a "moderate rain starting in 13 minutes" alert and hoping on the bike and zipping home in time. Don't know how they did it so well.
Yes! The history! Why such an obviously useful feature isn't in all weather apps, I shall never know. Along with the usage you mention, I was always wanting to know at least what the temperature was yesterday so that I could work out what to wear or do today.
I'd go as far to say that the absence of past weather data in most weather apps is symbolic of the wider state of design today. Anyone with any real design knowledge, any basic capacity to synthesize argument or think about problems, would find it obvious that showing past weather is useful because it provides context. So many statistical apps (so-called "dashboards") are such drek because of this too.
The first year of the new weather app they didn't even give you hourly precipitation chance throughout the day. If I had to pick what were the two key features of Dark Sky it would be 1) impending rain notifications, and 2) hourly precipitation chances.
It's included now, but still not as well as Dark Sky did it.
For an app not trying to reproduce Dark Sky, but doing a nice job with an overview of the day's weather, I've been using Overlook. But now I'm seeing that its app store listing is gone. https://apps.apple.com/app/overlook-weather/id1639571738
Same. If Apple had any sense they would have just slapped an Apple logo on Dark Sky and called it the new weather app, then used it to influence their core design language throughout the rest of the OS.
I’m using the weather app now, but am still longing for the spiritual successor to Dark Sky.
I had a similar feeling when Google bought and killed Sparrow. They should have simply replaced the Gmail app with Sparrow, instead, they killed the only email client I ever genuinely enjoyed using.
I feel like I wrote this lol. I couldn’t agree more with every aspect of your comment. The loss of Sparrow was a sad day, only to be topped with how Apple handled DarkSky.
Today Weather has precipitation alters and its UI is, IMO, better than that of Dark Sky. If you're looking for a free app there is also Weawow. Both allow the use of Apple's weather data.
this...every time i use the damn apple weather app i am reminded how much i miss dark sky and my contempt is rekindled. makes me wonder how often this sort of tragedy happens.
Something changed before Apple even bought it. It was not nearly as accurate by the time Apple bought it. I do still miss the app, but the data or the algorithm changed before the purchase.
i noticed the same exact thing. i thought weather had been solved with dark sky. then at some point something got messed up. i would love to know the full story behind this.
The unmatched clarity and simplicity of the data. The Weather app isn't in the same league. To my eye, it's a cluttered, gaudy mess, certainly compared to Dark Sky.
Carrot Weather has a mode that is almost a replacement for Dark Sky, btw, though the location-based alerts have gotten less and less reliable over the years (which I am completely unable to understand).
The biggest thing I find Weather to be missing is hyperlocal & timely accuracy.
While I understand the UI complaints others have, for the handful of things I normally want to see I find Weather fine enough vs Dark Sky. BUT, the accuracy took a noticeable downward trend.
If I wanted to see the heat index at 3PM in Dark Sky, I could just tap the "feels like" button under the hourly forecast (pictured further down in the linked blog post) and look at what it says at 3PM.
I just tried in Apple Weather, and the process was:
1. Tap on the hourly forecast, or the day, to go into the graph screen
2. Tap on the dropdown icon
3. Tap "feels like"
4. Either drag your finger along the graph until the time indicator at the top indicates you're close to 3PM, then read the temperature, or you can try to read it directly off the graph, but the axes aren't labeled clearly enough to make this feasible
With DarkSky, you used to be able to report current weather conditions. Augmenting weather modeling from sensors with real-time reports from users is critical for high levels of accuracy. Somehow this seems to have been completely overlooked in the integration with Apple's weather app.
It doesn’t seem to be nearly as accurate. I’ve abandoned the Apple Weather app in favor of The Weather Channel App, because the former seemed unreliable to me.
It's crap. No offense intended if you are on the team maintaining Apple Weather, but the interface is much more busy than DarkSky was and there is a lot less clarity and simplicity in how weather information is displayed. My impression is that the quality of the forecasts is also not as good, but that might just be my personal bias.
The fact that Apple chose to shut down one of the best apps on the iPhone in order to promote Apple Weather is still really irritating. I keep Darksky in the app graveyard on my phone, next to Apollo.
Been using Merry Sky (https://merrysky.net) quite happily as a replacement mostly for the layout/quick data viz. Mostly accurate/helpful as Dark Sky was, tho some rare data blackouts when it can't pull the data or whatever, but it's back in a few hours
Also check out briefsky. Like merrysky it supports the pirate weather API but it's open source / self hostable (at least I don't see any link to merrysky's source) and it supports several other weather APIs as well. I found switching it to the tomorrow.io API was much more accurate for beach weather.
The Dark Sky blog [1] had a post on their (then-new) app design, and also had many other posts on some details of their weather prediction algorithms and other technical bits. Sadly the blog was deleted after the Apple acquisition, but it is archived on the Wayback Machine. Some good reading!
I used to use darksky a lot, because it reminded me of Back To The Future 2 when it'd do the "done raining in 5 mins". It's a stupid request, but if other services could figure this out along with a cute UI like darksky, I'd be your best friend. Weather sites can have the best info, but if the UI is not good then its much harder to draw conclusions from the stats.
Tangent maybe. But when I used Dark Sky, I and everyone who asked me about the weather and I'd give them data from Dark Sky were always impressed by my accuracy for knowing when it would rain and stop raining. Now I use Carrot with the AccuWeather(sp) api, and it'll be pouring right on top of me, and Carrot tells me "no rain for the hour". Is this just weather getting harder and harder to predict, or is AccuWeather trash, or anyone else find something that seems as accurate as Dark Sky was?
I find the same issues with Apple's weather app. And even Windy's notifications. The only helpful thing is an actual heatmap visualization of rain. That always gives you a lot more context and a better understanding of what's happening and for how long. I actually really love Apple's rain heatmap
One of the many reasons I pay for Carrot is to get the other, more expensive, data sources. If you do stump up, you get access to the Apple Weather API--what once was Dark Sky--as well as Foreca. I've found both of them to be very accurate based on what Carrot reports.
(For what it's worth, I never used the Dark Sky app directly. I've always consumed it via Carrot or a free API key that Dark Sky used to give out for individual developers.)
Many times it would say something like Rain stopping in 10 minutes. Then 8 minutes later… Rain stopping in 15 minutes. On and on as it steadily rained.
My former coworker was insufferable about Dark Sky being accurate but I never found that to be the case. Same with his insistence I use Waze to go through random parking lots, only to find our cowokers beat us back from lunch using a sane route but I am digressing.
Where I am big thunderstorms are very common and it can be dry a quarter mile away. It’s a good indicator but I never found Dark Sky, Accuwhatever, or Apple Weather to be accurate with the rain forecast.
I dearly wish Apple would just publish Dark Sky again. Let the Weather app be whatever super clean design hero you want, just give us back this perfect information dense weather app to use day to day.
There have to be dozens of devs in apple who would love to be on the 1-2 person team it would take to maintain it. (It was a 2 person startup for years, don't come at me with how hard stuff is.) It could even be a reward for good service, "ok you successfully mucked around with weird EU privacy law in the health app for 2 years, instead of a sabbatical for therapy how about you get to work on Dark Sky for a year?"
What good would that be without the information backing it? (The DarkSky API server)
And if that information does still exist in the (public) Apple Weather API, why hasn't anyone (not just some Apple Engineer) just created an app with the views people care about?
Readit News
Where I live (US East Coast), the weather can feel dramatically different depending on the humidity. Relative Humidity has always felt to me like a poor way of measuring how humid the weather will feel. For example, 50% RH at 84ºF will feel lightly humid and generally pleasant, whereas 50% RH at at 97ºF will feel like a swamp. The dew points at those respective points - 63ºF and 75ºF - do a much better job at immediately conveying how humid the air will feel.
Dark Sky used to show hourly dew point graphs that you could browse throughout the week and see when the humidity would break (or return). Apple Weather does show you the dew point, but only when you select a point on the RH graph. So to track the dew point over the coming week, you basically need to drag your finger over each day's graph and observe the changing numbers.
I think this is probably just due to the lack of general awareness about how dew point is a more elegant shorthand for "absolute humidity" than any other weather metric currently in use. I hope there will be more of us in the future!
My web app plots hourly dew point for the next 24 hours, next 7 days, and past 2 days. (Still WIP.)
Inspired by https://merrysky.net (can also plot dew point), which was inspired by Dark Sky.
https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=40.7482&lon=-7...
1. Go to https://www.weather.gov/
2. Put your zip code into the Local forecast box.
3. Click the Hourly Weather Forecast graph on the right side.
4. Bookmark it.
EDIT: NVM, found it. You tap the temperature.
EDIT 2: It really ought to remember the units. 95% of the planet doesn't ever want to see Fahrenheit.
(weather gov data is open/free, you can pull it down and plot anyway you want)
https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?FcstType=graphical...
A very old version of their Android app had that view as a 3-day widget for the home screen. Right after it was bought they did a major upgrade and removed a ton of functionality, that widget included.
Windy.com to the rescue for dewpoint lovers.
For me, I've written myself a Google Apps script - to be more accurate, AI did, but with my interaction - that e-mails a "humidity forecast" as to how wet the next six days are going to feel to me in a simple way. I don't know who came up with the categories I've placed them in - it seemed to be common weather information.
https://github.com/mollyrealized/humid-fcast/blob/main/Code....
- The dew point is independent from the temperature, so it is effectively a measure of "absolute humidity."
- While both measurements have their advantages, I find dew point a better indicator of the "mugginess." Also it is easier to estimate the relative humidity given the dew point vs. estimate the dew point given the relative humidity.
- You can compare both here: https://weather-sense.leftium.com (humidity plot disabled, but the value can be checked by hovering.)
Thanks for teaching me about dew point (and to the commenters below you for letting me know there's a free Dark Sky clone - merrysky.net - and a dew point graph on Weather Underground)!
Besides the API, besides the hyper-local (and, in my experience, _always_ accurate) forecasts, besides the excellent visualizations, besides the nice web app, what I miss most was the history.
I loved the history. It was perhaps DarkSky's least appreciated feature.
You could search (at least within the US) for any date in the past few decades, and find the temperature and precipitation and whatnot for a given location.
You could see what the weather was like on those important dates in your life. You could see what the weather was like the day after those important dates in your life.
It's a little bit of memory that's been excised from the commons. It still makes me sad.
I'd go as far to say that the absence of past weather data in most weather apps is symbolic of the wider state of design today. Anyone with any real design knowledge, any basic capacity to synthesize argument or think about problems, would find it obvious that showing past weather is useful because it provides context. So many statistical apps (so-called "dashboards") are such drek because of this too.
It's included now, but still not as well as Dark Sky did it.
For an app not trying to reproduce Dark Sky, but doing a nice job with an overview of the day's weather, I've been using Overlook. But now I'm seeing that its app store listing is gone. https://apps.apple.com/app/overlook-weather/id1639571738
I’m using the weather app now, but am still longing for the spiritual successor to Dark Sky.
I had a similar feeling when Google bought and killed Sparrow. They should have simply replaced the Gmail app with Sparrow, instead, they killed the only email client I ever genuinely enjoyed using.
No excuse to not just buy Dark Sky and let them continue unburdened by corporate politics
Carrot Weather has a mode that is almost a replacement for Dark Sky, btw, though the location-based alerts have gotten less and less reliable over the years (which I am completely unable to understand).
While I understand the UI complaints others have, for the handful of things I normally want to see I find Weather fine enough vs Dark Sky. BUT, the accuracy took a noticeable downward trend.
I just tried in Apple Weather, and the process was:
1. Tap on the hourly forecast, or the day, to go into the graph screen
2. Tap on the dropdown icon
3. Tap "feels like"
4. Either drag your finger along the graph until the time indicator at the top indicates you're close to 3PM, then read the temperature, or you can try to read it directly off the graph, but the axes aren't labeled clearly enough to make this feasible
The fact that Apple chose to shut down one of the best apps on the iPhone in order to promote Apple Weather is still really irritating. I keep Darksky in the app graveyard on my phone, next to Apollo.
I'd say there's about a 80% chance that it loads the forecast in under 5 seconds.
Loading the radar has far worse performance - it only works ~50% of the time and failures just show an empty map forever.
When it does manage to load the weather I've found the accuracy to be hot garbage.
Pirate Weather is the backend for the Dark Sky-like Merry Sky: https://merrysky.net/
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20191210071310/https://blog.dark...
(For what it's worth, I never used the Dark Sky app directly. I've always consumed it via Carrot or a free API key that Dark Sky used to give out for individual developers.)
Many times it would say something like Rain stopping in 10 minutes. Then 8 minutes later… Rain stopping in 15 minutes. On and on as it steadily rained.
Where I am big thunderstorms are very common and it can be dry a quarter mile away. It’s a good indicator but I never found Dark Sky, Accuwhatever, or Apple Weather to be accurate with the rain forecast.
There have to be dozens of devs in apple who would love to be on the 1-2 person team it would take to maintain it. (It was a 2 person startup for years, don't come at me with how hard stuff is.) It could even be a reward for good service, "ok you successfully mucked around with weird EU privacy law in the health app for 2 years, instead of a sabbatical for therapy how about you get to work on Dark Sky for a year?"
And if that information does still exist in the (public) Apple Weather API, why hasn't anyone (not just some Apple Engineer) just created an app with the views people care about?
How dare you want information!
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