> 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.
I understand that Apple has no obligation to support a platform that is not their own, but this really hurts to hear after using Dark Sky on Android and the API for _years_
It's important to acknowledge that there is a benefit: Apple products' value increases in relation to other platforms' when they introduce more exclusive offerings. The right to do this without repercussions is hurting IT. Big IT business is rife with anti-competitive crap that noone should put up with.
I actually don't think it should be legal for a platform to buy software and then remove it from a competing platform. It's incredibly anti-competitive.
If they made their own software and didn't put it on Android, sure. But this isn't it.
Many countries have some sort of "Competition Commission" whose role is to determine if acquisitions/mergers are bad for either the market or consumers. This might be for monopolistic reasons or other negative issues.
In this case, a platform buying up cross-platform software to eliminate support for competing platforms is clearly causing harm to consumers. In similar situations, a government might legislate to force companies to be either the pipe/platform or a content supplier but not both, to eliminate precisely this type of anti-consumer incentive.
You can always come up with a ludicrous policy; it doesn't detract from the potential of regulation. Would you accept General Motors buying freeways and not allowing others' platforms on it? Competition must be regulated.
Also, isn't the barrier between iOS and Android devices artificial? I don't see a veritable technical reason why the two platforms can't be compatible.
Not processors though, right? OSX and Windows are distinct as well, but Web apps are portable. The main reason why there isn't an analogue native standard is that the economics incentivize walled gardens.
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 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.
Vaguely topical thought: I wonder if we’re going to see a lot more of this. A large economic downturn means a lot of small, independent companies will struggle to survive. Being swallowed by a megacorp might be one of the few ways to keep something alive.
In Tokyo I was blown away by Apple Maps- found it way more useful than Google (gmaps is my default). Maybe only useful to tourists who are used to simpler transit systems, but I was happy to see Apple was driving the state of the art there.
Reasonable considering the situation , sure. But the situation shouldn't be happening in the first place. I could understand closing off the API even. What I don't accept is shuttering the Android app.
I wish they would keep that alive in even a limited way and keep all the fanciness to Apple at the very least.
> 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 their lawyers to drive Armstrong into debt in a protracted legal battle. This drove Armstrong to suicide by defenestration. For companies like Apple, these acquisitions are more about killing competition than they are about improving their own services or user interfaces.
I don't know. How's Dark Sky competing with Apple? I don't think they derive much, if any, revenue from the Weather app. More likely they're paying for the data.
You forgot to add
with more restrictions, decreased customer satisfaction, upsetting early supporters, and an incomplete storefront that barely has enough online features to state it was built in the last 2 decades.
Buying things to bury just to make sure the competition doesn't get them is by no means a new business model or invented by Epic Games. It's been a solid go to for most big companies since forever. It's nothing new for Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc.
So I exclusively use Dark Sky on my iPhone and watch. They could also be looking at the data and noticing that most people use Dark Sky as opposed to the default weather app.
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 productions/applications.
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.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/03/31/apple-buys...
> 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.
... 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.
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.
I realy love the norwegian weather service, yr.no (Has english language selection on top). It works worldwide and has an open API [1]. Not sure where they get the data though but short term it's very good here in Sweden. Long term tends to be a bit exagerated though but improves the closer it gets.
as an aside, my first thought at this phrase was that "he died by removing all the windows?" it took a second to process that properly.
but to the point, that's the kind of anti-competition we need to root out quickly. compete on merits, not on demerits.
i'm sad about the embark app, but i'm hoping that the dark sky integration means no more sending data (however "anonymized") to the shady data broker that is the weather channel.
The Defenestrations of Prague (Czech: Pražská defenestrace, German: Prager Fenstersturz, Latin: Defenestratio Pragensis) were three incidents in the history of Bohemia in which multiple people were defenestrated (thrown out of a window). The origin of the word "defenestrate" ("out of the window") is believed to come from the episodes in Prague in 1618 when the disgruntled Protestant estates threw two royal governors out of the castle window and wrote an extensive Apologia to this act.
Funnily enough, they're two different Latin word elements. Simplified, there's the "down" de-, as in "destroy," and the "undo" de-, like "defrost." The "undo" de- is also the "not" de- and the "away" de-, related to dis- ("disallow", "discard").
By shenanigans, do you perhaps mean the rigorous testing regime applied to a device which will literally be putting the air in your lungs while you're unconscious??
I for one am super happy that people with this attitude have been totally unable to penetrate the medical devices field!
TLDR: A $3000 ventilator was “on schedule to file for market approval in September 2013” and then Covidien bought out the competition to prevent it coming to fruition.
Covidien at the time already sold a $5000 portable ventilator, which was never rejected by the FDA. The prospective Newport ventilator was rejected for neonatal use, which was a requirement of their BARDA contract.
no, to clarify, apple has been using the weather channel (exclusively, i believe) for weather info across its ecosystem. you can't get integrated weather info on apple devices (iphone, watch, etc.) without it (you can download other apps but they wouldn't integrate with the OS).
i'd be super happy if they switched to the national weather service, but absent that, dark sky is more privacy preserving than the weather channel (who reportedly sell location data, for example).
"In 2017, Trump nominated Barry Myers, the former CEO of AccuWeather, a company that has advocated for the privatization of large parts of the National Weather Service, to lead NOAA. However, his nomination stalled, in part because of conflict-of-interest concerns since his family still owns the private forecasting company."
It's in general putting Apple to like with the company and finishes with the statement:
> For companies like Apple, these acquisitions are more about killing competition than they are about improving their own services or user interfaces
You definitely see this with not just Apple but any big tech company. Either they acquire a company for their tech, for their people who work there (talent), for their data or finally, just to be able to kill their company/product.
> Either they acquire a company for their tech, for their people who work there (talent), for their data or finally, just to be able to kill their company/product.
To make the list more complete I've seen large tech companies acquire another tech company for their users and/or their brand. Think about Microsoft buying Github or Skype.
It certainly doesn't seem like either of those examples further your point. Both GitHub and Skype still exist as essentially the same core product they were at the time of acquisition, plus lots of new features which are clearly the results of substantial investment in the product by Microsoft.
GitHub was a complimentary product that fits into Microsoft’s strategy.
Skype was almost certainly some sort of scheme to kill Skype and bring lawful intercept to the platform. Skype at one point owned consumer voip globally.
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.
When I first read "killing their competition" I thought it meant killing competition in the form of weather apps. That didn't make any sense to me since Apple makes no money off the Weather app. Only after re-reading that sentence a few times did I realize the OP meant killing Android.
That said, I don't believe that to be the issue either. Death by a thousand cuts, maybe, but I seriously doubt closing off one app from the Android ecosystem is going to do any damage whatsoever. I think this is more about the acquisition of talent and nothing more.
> 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.
Not disagreeing with the following paragraph, but GP specifically asked about "access", and all of these iOS users already had access to Dark Sky; this strictly decreases access, even if more people end up using it.
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.
RGBZ in general. They killed a market just to have a minor feature in their phones. Also keep in mind that Primesense's biggest precious licensee was an Apple competitor.
They’re adding rear facing depth sensor for use with ARKit and are known to have an AR headset in development. I think the new sensor works differently from Primesense (which used a grid projector and a camera instead of LiDAR?) but clearly Apple is doing more with this. I'd be shocked if they didn't have years worth of prototype phones with Primesense systems on the back.
Unfortunately this is still a very narrow vision of what is possible with RGBZ or just Z. You won't want to strap an iPad to a robot, or mount a bunch of iPads on your ceiling, or below your TV connected to your game console.
Presumably the rear-facing LiDAR sensor in the new iPads as well, and I suspect those are basically a developer preview for the iPhone 12 Pro hardware so that improved ARKit apps can be ready for the fall
My experience with Shazam is that it has got less good at identifying music since Apple bought it. My guess is that it now ONLY identifies music from the Apple Music catalog.
This suggests that Apple may only buy to augment their product line; whilst still making the core experience worse for everyone overall.
I’ll admit I’ve not done a proper study of post-acquisition Shazam. I’m going on casual observation here.
Apple believes it should make/provide the whole “widget”. If they think every phone should ship with a really good weather app, they’ll do one. If one comes on the market that they think is better, they’ll buy it and make it the new default.
I mean they’re not in the weather app business. They aren’t competing against Dark Sky. What they’re competing against is Android, and if their phone comes with a stellar weather app out of the box, that is good for Apple. Others can continue to make weather apps.
iOS comes with a calculator. People still buy PC Calc and Calcbot despite the built-in being pretty useful.
I really wish we could make custom Apple Watch faces, for instance. At least open up the API for it for developers - for example - Apple does not provide an Apple Watch face with both an analog and digital representation, and I can’t make it, beyond an app, which I’d have to constantly reopen...just us me do the things, Apple!
I heard it was because Apple’s C-levels weren’t happy with any of the concepts for a calculator UX that fills the screen of an iPad - and they’re right, even the best iPad calculator there is (PCalc) feels weird to use just to do some quick sums because it fills up my 13-inch iPad Pro’s screen.
I remember some early fan-made concepts for the iPad had it running iPhone apps in floating windows - I think if Apple baked that functionality into the iPad OS from the beginning it would have meant a whole slew of small utility apps like the calculator, clocks and alarms, compass, etc wouldn’t need to be remade - but I’m sure they killed that idea because it wouldn’t motivate developers into making first-class iPad apps - and by “punishing” users with the terrible full-screen iPhone app mode it incentivises developers to put effort into making good native iPad apps - while at the same time making small utility apps an impossibility for iPad OS (though this doesn’t seem to have convinced Instagram...)
To be fair, they could exist now as a Today Screen widget, but then you can’t use it while you have another app open. It’s only with iOS 12+ multitasking support for slide-over and side-bar apps that a calculator app could now work - but it would still need to support full-screen mode - but we’re so close now! And given that, I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple did allow iPad apps to run only in sidebar or floating mode - but only if an app really won’t work as a full-screen app - and when/if they do, they’ll definitely launch their own calculator app.
Y’know the Apple Watch didn’t get a first-party calculator until 2019?
He had a lifelong neurological condition. He didn't work for RCA. It wasn't just RCA that tried to restrict him. RCA did offer him a million dollars that he refused. He did hit his wife with a poker and she left him.
It's a terrible story and he was treated badly, but you're making it more dramatic than it was.
Seriously—as someone who lives in a place where a simple rainstorm can have major consequences, DarkSky's "It's going to rain in the next hour"-style alerts have become an important tool.
I'm an otherwise happy tvOS, macOS and MBP (though Android-using) customer but I'm going to need to re-consider lest I get bitten again in the future.
> 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.
Semi-related but for transit apps, I much prefer the dedicated "Transit" app over any of the mapping services.
It has great visualizations of nearby lines and departures, gives bike/walk/taxi alternative times, allows you to select which transit systems, much more customizable in route planning, alerts on stops, schedule changes, when to leave, and it utilizes live data from other riders on where a bus or train is if you're willing to share your location during your ride.
Worked well in every North American city I've been in with a transit system.
>Semi-related but for transit apps, I much prefer the dedicated "Transit" app over any of the mapping services.
Have you tried Citymapper? It looks pretty similar in features and covers a different set of cities (there's some crossover but not as much as I'd of thought), might be useful.
From my use in London, out of Google Maps, Apple Maps, and Citymapper, I've found Citimapper to be the worst.
They're all basically working with the exact same data, but I find Apple Map transit directions to be the easiest to use, providing I'm in one of the limited cities it supports.
I've also never liked the built-in Transit functionality in either Google or Apple maps. It always seems like it's trying to be smart, rather than giving me the information I actually want. (The information I actually want is, "should I leave now, or will I just be stranded underground for 30 minutes?" I know how long it takes me to get down to the platform at the stations I frequent, but Apple and Google don't.)
I wrote my own little thing: https://jrock.us/mta.html. It just pulls the train arrival times for my home and work stations, the transfer stations along the way, and system-wide service advisories. It fits on one screen. The code is a trash fire (it's just jquery that injects raw HTML), but it works ;)
Crap. I liked Dark Sky.
I actually downloaded it because Apple Weather predicted 50 degrees F and it turned out to be 30degrees F with another 30 windchill.
Grats Dark Sky founders.
> But shutting down the API and Android apps feels like an egregious move by Apple.
Yes but that's inline with what you'd expect Apple to do though. They won't support any non-Apple ecosystem unless they have to - it's just their way of doing things
Where does Dark Sky get its weather data? Do they crowdsource any data from their apps? If so, then continuing to support Android devices could still provide value to Apple.
This is pure speculation but Shazam is a UK company and I'm 99% convinced that if they had locked the app to iOS, the European Commission would have blocked the deal and maybe sued them for anti-competitive practices.
This really sucks, I work for a stormwater environmental company and we were looking at darksky to replace our existing provider; DarkSky is one of the best providers of weather data.IBM also bought weather underground, I am really what these big tech companies want with forecasting/weather companies.
Have you considered using the National Weather Service API directly? To someone with only a casual interest in this stuff it seems like it has what I would want, curious about shortcomings compared with the many commercial offerings? Especially considering it's their data that e.g. DarkSky resells.
The Dark Sky API combines lots of data sources, and its weather data is not limited to the US. I use it for cities all around the world. The US National Weather Service API cannot replace it.
Sorry, I didn't see your question until now. Unless I'm mistaken, they had a list of their sources somewhere on their website that I saw a few years ago. I don't think they said where their minute-by-minute came from, but I'm quite sure they calculated that data themselves.
How does Darksky do it's minute-by-minute precipitation forecasts, though? I only see hourly forecasts in the API. I'm guessing they are doing some of their own forecasting.
>Yes but that's inline with what you'd expect Apple to do though.
I'd argue the exact opposite. They keep pronouncing they're now a services company. If that's TRULY their go-forward model, they should be selling services to the broadest possible audience. Shutting it down to other audiences tells me they're still a hardware company that can't see past their walled garden.
If anyone at Apple is listening, I'll say it for the thousandth time: Support Messages on Android and Windows and you will own the messaging market. If you keep kicking the can, someone will eventually take it from you. Just look at Blackberry and what you did to them... it can and will happen to you as well. BES was thought to be an impenetrable wall. Narrator: It wasn't.
This coming from someone who switched back to iPhone after the last round of goog privacy snafu's.
Apple has shown they are not afraid to build products that are 100% services (TV+, Music, etc). Just because a product is delivered as a service doesn't mean the correct strategy is to spray it everywhere.
It's not a matter of seeing past the walled garden. So long as there is a roadmap for deep platform integrations (identity, payments, AR, GPU, etc) and the desire for those integrations to be 100% available to _anyone_ with a blue bubble, the service will not leave Apple. IMO, it's about protecting the path of innovation while keeping a key feature (compatibility across all users) in play. Available is key because feature adoption spreads virally. Nobody wants to see someone do something in iMessage and then learn they can't do it.
You sound like you're reading from the RIM playbook circa 2004. It's not a matter of IF, it's a matter of WHEN the product that kills them shows up. The only reason that Facebook hasn't already supplanted them is their horrendous record on security - eventually a player without that track record will come along and eat their lunch. Facebook messenger became "good enough" just about at the exact time the Cambridge Analytica scandal happened - at which point even the non-nerds started deleting their accounts and abandoning their messaging platform.
I think the mistake you’re making is thinking Apple cares about messaging. They don’t. They care about the iOS platform. Messages gives them a competitive advantage in that sector. Yes a competing messaging service might surpass it, in fact this has already happened in China with WeChat. This goes some way to level of the playing field with Android over there.
But putting Messages on Android would level the playing field as well. It might give them the dominant messaging platform, at least outside a China, but so what? There’s no reason for them to care about that. They’re not Facebook.
I think if Apple didn't care about messaging they would just kill their investment and let SMS and 3P apps do the job. They wouldn't just throw money away to make something they didn't care about.
No product is going to come around and kill iMessage because it isn't zero sum. iMessage has a guaranteed priority slot in the OS because Apple owns it. As an Apple user, I prefer iMessage over every other messaging platform. It is just more fun and has better expression. Period. It's too bad I can't iMessage everyone, but hey, I can iMessage lots of people. Don't think that will _ever_ go away.
What’s the purpose of “owning messaging?” All of the popular messaging companies make money via advertising.
Messaging needs a network effect. The other alternative besides advertising is charging customers. Can you point to one successful platform that has a network effect and charges customers?
This is why we should be hostile to Swift being used outside of the Apple ecosystem.
To all the folks trying to make Swift server development compelling: please stop. Use Golang or Rust instead.
Apple is an antagonist of other platforms/ecosystems, and there's no reason to believe they won't use Swift to force developers to buy and run Macbooks.
Edit: Would the multitude of downvoters provide a counter argument? Why should we tolerate this behavior from Apple?
I'm upset when other companies use the same playbook. There's an equal opportunity for all companies to behave better here. As it stands, I do not support this.
I've used some of their Android apps (Apple Music for the longest time). It feels like someone made them as a weekend project and then Apple forgot to take it down.
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 Sony than Google.
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.
Apple has not described themselves as a services company. Tim Cook has said that growth in the company will come from services. So the company focuses on that. Apple provides some services, it is not a services company.
Apple is trying its best to brand itself as a services company, but its actions show that it is not ready to actually embrace the platform openness that comes with it. Look at Microsoft for a much better example of a services-focused company which also sells hardware.
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.
Sigh is right. I used and paid for dark sky on Android, and now it's dead.
This is one way Apple tries to lock people in, and it's really frustrating. This isn't an efficient market situation, this is a monopolist protecting their walled garden kingdom by slurping up the cross platform innovators. I'm terribly disappointed in the Dark Sky authors for doing this to long time loyal customers, no matter what their paychecks look like.
There is a difference between being a monopoly and monopolist behaviour. One has successfully become the only one standing, one is seeking to shut out competition by one method or another. At least to my understanding.
Apple has a pattern of purchasing companies that already offer products on other platforms and immediately shutting all non-iOS products down.
Obviously, they're free to run their business however they want, but it's also understandable that fans of those products might be upset that their app (or APIs that power other apps they enjoy) are no longer available simply because Apple did "their usual thing". Many companies (including Apple in rare cases) maintain or even develop codebases for applications across more than one platform.
There's nothing wrong with Apple buying companies to shut them down. It just sucks for the end-users who no longer get to use those companies' products for the sole reason of "they got bought by Apple".
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.
A monopoly exists when there is a single seller of a commodity. Copyrights and patents are government-granted monopolies.
A broader definition is that a monopolist is a provider that has pricing power - the ability to set prices.
Apple has a monopoly on the channel to deliver iOS apps. Anyone seeking to deliver an iOS app must accept Apple's terms, including Apple's cut of revenue.
> Apple has a monopoly on the channel to deliver iOS apps.
That's only a monopoly in the same sense that McDonalds has a monopoly on Big Macs. It's within their own ecosystem. Customers can decide whether they want to buy into that ecosystem or choose an alternative (like Burger King, or Android).
Buying a burger is an independent transaction. Buying a Big Mac one day doesn't make you less likely to buy a Whopper the next.
Buying a phone is an investment that locks you into that ecosystem for ~2 years (until you buy a new one), and once that time comes, both ecosystems encourage you to stick with your existing choice via purchase transfers, exclusives, and (more) seamless data transfers.
Your comparison would only make sense in a world where McD and BK competed by lacing their burgers with different drugs to get you chemically addicted.
Fuck Apple, fuck Google, and fuck Tim Cook in particular. This is fucking depressing, and almost makes COVID seem appealing. At least it would take your mind off this bullshit for a while.
We're not talking about a monopoly on selling particular phones as physical products. We're talking about apps, which often, but not always are much more 'burger-like'.
I think the best analogy would be video games on console platforms, does Sony have a 'monopoly' on PlayStation games? Well, kind of if you squint really hard, not that it seems to stand in the way of a vibrant and competitive console industry and that's the key issue. If there's a competitive market that is serving customer needs, and no deceptive practices so customers have a clear choice then it's hard to argue there's a market dysfunction such as a monopoly.
> does Sony have a 'monopoly' on PlayStation games?
Yes? The whole console industry is equally awful, and does the same bullshit. That said, there used to be a few mitigating factors for consoles, but they have never been relevant for phones:
1. Generational incompatibility: Since console generations generally weren't backwards-compatible, every new generation would more or less reset the playing field.
2. You could have multiple consoles connected to your TV. You probably won't bring multiple phones with you every day.
Utilities within a city are monopoly providers of electricity, water, and sewer services.
"That's only a monopoly in the same sense that McDonalds has a monopoly on Big Macs. It's within their own ecosystem. Customers can decide whether they want to buy into that ecosystem or choose an alternative" (like living in the next town over, or solar power, water delivery, and portable toilets).
The fact that alternatives exist (live somewhere else! live disconnected!) does not negate the fact that the utility is a monopoly provider of those services.
The primary difference between utility monopolies and the iOS monopoly is that utilities are a "natural" monopoly (there are significant infrastructure costs to enter the market of providing running water to homes in a city) whereas the iOS monopoly is government-granted via copyrights and contracts and digital locks that exclude competitors, and those locks are again protected by DMCA copyright law.
There is no natural reason there cannot be a competing app store on iOS, except that Apple wants to preserve its monopoly.
Would you let a home builder dictate what food delivery options you have? Why let a phone builder dictate what software delivery options you have?
Monopolies aren't the issue, anti-competive behavior is. Buying out a company and then shutting out your competitor's customers is pretty anti-competetive and also clearly bad for consumers.
> A large economic downturn means a lot of small, independent companies will struggle to survive. Being swallowed by a megacorp might be one of the few ways to keep something alive.
This occurred to me as well, almost as soon as the economic impacts of COVID-19 was apparent. And in particular that this will strenghen the power of large coporations that can weather the storm, at the expense of smaller companies, and competition.
I've been a Dark Sky user since the beginning. I likely brought about a dozen users to their service over the years. This really sucks, but I'm sure for the founders it was worth it. Apple will lose a lot of viability in Dark Sky as they'll be cutting off sensor input - so I guess, I just don't understand the move. Sure, Apple weather sucks so maybe this replaces it?
I think the thing that frustrates me is that I've been a paying customer for a long time only for the parent purchaser to shut me out. Like I said, I'm glad for the founders, but as the parent here has stated - I highly doubt Apple will do much of anything with this.
Apple always is rough with acquisitions of consumer stuff. Workflow is a great example, many of the third party integrations and Apple Watch support went poof.
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.
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.
Privacy is an interesting argument. Apple theoretically respects privacy more, but you have to take their word. You don't have control of your device.
Android phones on the other hand at least have the option of installing a variant that is more privacy focused, such as Copperhead[1].
I can install F-Droid and follow some of the other recommendations on the Free Software Foundation website to "Free my Android"[2]. All without having to jailbreak my device.
Now, granted this is an expert action, but it allows people that care about it to accomplish it. Do you lose a lot of functionality? Sure, but all Security and Privacy is about trade-offs.
For every "expert" who takes advantage of those options on Android, there are thousands upon thousands of Apple users who get better privacy by default.
So all in all, you have three options: No privacy used by billions (Android), a little privacy used by millions (iOS) or some privacy used by thousands (Android derivatives).
If you are willing to sacrifice privacy, why not go android? If you do not want to, you must buy an android phone and tweak it. Using Apple is but a compromise.
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.
Actually you can buy the kindle book, you just have to use the web browser (not ideal I know, but just letting you know in case you find yourself in that position again)
Absolutely, and I do this when buying from Kindle. I don't consider Kindle to be perfect either, but it's still MY choice to make, not Apples. If I want to buy from Kobo or from Kindle, why should I have to do that in a web browser or on my desktop.
I consider that tying myself in knots. On my Samsung I just copy the files over and play them
Privacy and openness are two independent, orthogonal concepts. I agree Apple has a better overall story on privacy but I care more about openness, especially in the current political climate.
At this point the only two things that are stopping me from leaving Apple:
- The hope that iPhone 9 will not be a gigantic phone and it might actually be around the size of SE.
- There's nowhere to go to. Can't go back to generic Android. That's just a non-starter. There are no OEMs who supports a privacy focussed Android ROM and sends "timely" patches and OS upgrades (there are some niche ones but they will either never start direct service/support in my country or in a decade maybe).
How do you know they did? You can buy a company without handing over any sensitive user data. I doubt Apple needs the data if it’s more of an aquihire.
Yes you can technically do anything, but unless the press release says "Dark Sky is joining Apple but is also deleting all customer data from its servers beforehand" it's safe to assume that Apple owns the entire company (including its physical and intellectual assets) unless proven otherwise.
Jesus christ. That’s the second time in 3 months that I’ll have to rewrite rainmeter skins to change weather API. How hard can it be to just point to data? Time to just go NOAA.
>A large economic downturn means a lot of small, independent companies will struggle to survive. Being swallowed by a megacorp might be one of the few ways to keep something alive.
this is going to huge oil company consolidation now
This isn't because of the economic downturn. This is because just before COVID-19, Saudia Arabia and Russia began an oil supply war.
It's a pissing match between MBS and Putin. MBS/SA wanted to increase production which lowers prices, Putin wanted to maintain current levels because lower prices let US shale oil back into the market.
Prices dropped to the mid USD 30s per barrel.
Then COVID-19 hit.
The result is that oil has dropped now to mid USD20s/barrel.
US shale oil producers are uneconomical below USD40/barrel.
As a founder or VC you just made a lot of money. As a normal employee you just found out that 1) buyouts don’t make you rich, 2) that “success” can look exactly like failure because your product got cancelled, and in about four months, 3) that promises from your ex boss are unenforceable.
The major upside for most employees is that they just got acquihired into Apple and they get to put that on their resume. Not everyone is so fortunate.
It wasn't until I read the commentary that I realized that Dark Sky has Android developers. That may end up being an uncomfortable choice between quickly learning Swift or being phased out.
This is really, really disappointing. I've been pretty critical of Dark Sky at times for being mediocre for more than maybe 12 hours out, but for very short term forecasts it worked great. I spent a fair amount of time outdoors and getting a 30 minute heads-up for "drizzle" versus "heavy rain" was excellent and really let me time how long to stay outside for.
I'd really, really like a replacement on Android. While Wunderground could be it, it's unfortunately not. The app is heavy and crappy and ad-laden and weirdly non-nonsensical.
It is great, and one of the other main weather apps that I use. But it lacks alerts. Dark Sky gives these (literally "Light Rain Starting in 20 Minutes" or "Heavy Rain Starting in 5 Minutes".
Dark Sky also does a fair job of showing general forecast and chances of things over the next week or so.
While I use Windy as an app for me to check and see what's going on, it's not nearly there on the prediction front. Much less notifications that help with "Woah -- heavy rain, time to head back to the car" or "Just a drizzle, cool, let's keep going".
Saildrone's forecast app is like Dark Sky but even better and more beautiful. They don't have an android app yet, just iOS, but I believe one is in development, and they have a full-featured in-browser client. No affiliation, but I know someone who works there who showed me their app.
https://spotwx.com/ is good for very technical forecasts. You can select the weather model, and it shows you the grid square corresponding to your queried location. windy.com is good for access to the European model, which used to do better in mountainous regions but now the GFS is quite good. It tends to be a "drier" model than GFS.
> Our goal has always been to provide the world with the best weather information possible, to help as many people as we can stay dry and safe, and to do so in a way that respects your privacy.
I don't understand how being acquired by Apple helps further that goal. Removing support for non-Apple devices seems to drastically lower the number of people who you are helping.
I am interested in seeing what happens to this service moving forward as it sounds like the API may be closed off completely by 2021 as well.
> I don't understand how being acquired by Apple helps further that goal. Removing support for non-Apple devices seems to drastically lower the number of people who you are helping.
I would imagine that DarkSky will become the basis for the default weather apps in iOS and macOS, and the number of people who use those defaults is drastically higher than the number of people who use DarkSky iOS/Android as a third-party app. The total addressable market shrinks, but the functional number of users increases.
That thoroughly misses the point. They could do both. There is zero reason to shrink the addressable market other than Apple not wanting to play with others.
We may not agree (and I don't agree with Apple's move here) but it's hardly surprising that they would shut it down for their direct competitor platform.
Let's not forget that it is/was a paid subscription on Android, so offering it for free on iOS and keeping paid on Android would still give them a significant edge. Somebody else in this thread mentioned that Shazam is still available on Android even after the acquisition, so it's definitely not as obvious as you suggest.
Not only that, but presumably if Dark Sky becomes the base for the iOS default Weather app, then there won't be a DS standalone iOS app. So they wouldn't just be maintaining a port, it would be an entire Android app with no iOS equivalent.
Its very hard to maintain an Android app to the same quality that people expect from Apple. I can see why they'd want to shrink that headcount or redirect to a more productive endeavor. As a bonus, Apple devices get a better weather app than the competition. The API part doesn't make as much sense, since they could make a pretty penny reselling that data without as much support burden.
apple has 100 billion dollars in the bank, funding a world-class android team should be possible if not desirable for them as they transform more and more in to a services company
It's not about money, or else Google's YouTube app wouldn't be a massive pile of failure on iOS, tvOS, etc. It's about being able to manage teams and maintain direction.
thanks for writing the exact same thing as the person next to you, but im not talking about "just throwing money", i'm talking about what they do when their ever-increasing war-chest stops increasing and they actually have to build things for people who can't afford their ever more expensive hardware. If apple thinks that they can continue running their ecosystem this way, i'm gonna be cackling in a few years.
They could have just bought the developers to work on Product X at Apple and don't want them wasting their time on something else. That's how a lot of Tech M&A is done...
That's a very good point. The number of people they are helping will drastically increase if that integration happens. It's unfortunate that the direct users who aren't on Apple's platforms can't continue to use it anymore.
> I don't understand how being acquired by Apple helps further that goal.
It doesn't. I will found a company just to have it acquired, so my press release can be:
> We had to choose between making shitloads of money, enough to not care about anything ever again, or let you continue seeing slightly more accurate weather. Guess what we chose, sucker! Thanks for giving us money, see you never.
As a user, I would actually be far less offended by such an honest statement. I find it difficult to blame people for wanting money, and trivial to demonize them for lying about it.
I'm sending an email to tell them how disappointed I feel as a long-time subscriber about them maliciously (since there is no other more generous explanation) shutting down the service for Android users: https://darksky.net/contact
Well, it's not like they suddenly replaced the whole team overnight, but I guess I get your point. I don't claim it could change anything, but I still believe that it's important to (respectfully) let the team know how their paying ex-customers feel about their decisions.
> since there is no other more generous explanation
How about "Apple just bought a really talented team of developers and want them to work on the Next Big Thing at Apple rather than spend their time on a product that doesn't do anything for Apple's strategy?"
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?
I appreciate your effort, I really do, but you'll get a lot farther complaining on HN. Nobody is going to do anything about it here either, but at least here you'll have people that care what you think.
The difference I think is the scale and name recognition of Shazam and wanting to get new customers via Apple Music. They can even say something like "with an iPhone you don't even need an app for Shazam, you can just use Siri", but that works better if non-Apple users know what Shazam is. while this they will probably retire to be used as the nameless backend to the default weather app.
Still, killing DarkSky on Android seems to offer little gain while hurting DarkSky supporters and generating ill will. I hope Apple and DarkSky can reconsider this decision.
Very disappointed. I've been a Dark Sky API user since 2015. It's a huge disappointment that a cash flush, closed ecosystem company is purchasing and shutting down a unique data source for point prediction weather forecasts.
> Our API service for existing customers is not changing today, but we will no longer accept new signups. The API will continue to function through the end of 2021.
And yet another functional API shut down and privatized. This is the way of the web now, a few companies owning the data, and nothing cool left to mess around with.
I can't be the only one who has noticed this trend happening for years. You used to be able to scroll to the footer of practically any service and find an API link. No more.
Et al - maybe, but Dark Sky built their own near-future "hyperlocal" forecasting engine and they were the first ones to do that. They basically invented the whole genre.
Perhaps they expanded into repackaging NOAA data now, but that's not what Dark Sky is about.
IIRC they built the models with user data, but stopped collecting from phones because so many different sensors are used for rH and temp in phones plus being in pockets, battery temp, etc meant the data had too much variance. Even though I hate that they did this bc it's my favourite weather app, it actually would make sense to just use iphones if they were going to start collecting that data again since all the hardware is the same.
The barometer data that comes from phones (both Android and iOS) is extremely resilient and there is a lot of value to be derived from it. Ongoing research by Cliff Mass and team (at UW) shows that machine learning can help bias-correct and error-correct barometric pressure data on the fly with very good results. That data can also be assimilated into WRF to make forecasts with higher accuracy.
They used an ML/statistical approach to forecasting, rather than physical modeling. They had some secret sauce in doing fast ML on phones, before libraries like CoreML existed.
Dark Sky claimed to do significant weather data collection themselves, via barometers in phones. I don't know if that data was ever used or available in their API, but definitely, the data Dark Sky had was all not public data.
As someone that's tried using the weather.gov API, let me just say it's atrociously bad. I'm sure the data is accurate and all, but the API is actively hostile towards developers.
You've basically described all commercial weather apps. Dark Sky (and some others) do incorporate other local sources of info, but free govt data covers much/most of what they use.
It's designed that way. AccuWeather and other weather companies actively lobby to make sure that people continue using them, and not the free government sources of weather data.
That endpoint groups hour-by-hour forecasts (see below) together to deduplicate data, but it makes it very painful to parse. For instance, "2020-03-31T15:00:00+00:00/PT4H" means that value is valid for 4 hours beginning at 2020-03-31T15:00:00+00:00. The durations varied from time interval to time interval and it made it super annoying to parse through.
There are a number of global weather data providers in the world - AerisWeather (quite functional, great mapping too), Accuweather (big network but expensive and little instruction), OWM (not very full featured, more for commodity weather), Climacell (robust network but not sure about their data collection practices.)
I get that these dumb acquisition blog-posts are practically lifted from a template and hardly mean anything, but please don't tell me that your goal is to "to help as many people as we can stay dry and safe" in practically the same breath that you announce you are killing the app on the world's most popular mobile platform.
Am I the only one doing barometric pressure data research on Android now? Maybe IBM does it, it's also hard to say.
The areas of research that Dark Sky did not follow through with are disappointing. They seemed very focused on making math-statistics estimates of forecasts and never doing the real hard science.
Oh no! DarkSky.net was my first open source Swift project (back when it was called ForecastIO)! I'm sad to see that the API seems to be going away next year.
> 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 apps for Android. Just so Apple can flex on Google, even though I was a paying customer for both. During a major pandemic when public services are heavily reduced and poor access to good weather apps could put people in danger.
Extremely disgusting and extremely horrible. Always feels great to know that my reward for supporting startups is to be cannon fodder to rounding errors at major corporations.
You are exactly the reason why companies like Dark Sky can be bought by Apple: you have only ever paid for one Android app. That does not make a vibrant app economy.
Another thing would help a more vibrant app economy would be if more teams made high-quality apps that I want that I can pay a few dollars a year in exchange for no advertisements or tracking.
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.
Totally agree. I find I have to load it, close and reopen the app about 95% of the time. Hugely bummed these two apps are going into the wastebin. Certainly leaves a huge void for us Android users.
Sadly at some point they weren't able to pay for the dark sky API anymore and since then the quality of forecasts is a bit less convincing. I'm still rather shocked by the low reviews though, for me it works well and I love that you can add a dozen cities and see the forecast.
No it's not. It's only available if you bought it before it changed hands and providers, as I did.
Supposedly they're still fixing bugs from the new weather provider before it's made public, but it hasn't been updated in ten months. I doubt it will be improved anymore, and I don't really use it much since the new provider is mediocre at best.
If you are in the United States, nothing beats getting the forecast straight from the horses mouth (NWS that is). Some companies are notorious for producing 30+ day forecasts, which can't have any meaningful levels of skill.
NOAA/NWS should just create their own mobile application. I use Wx[1], which parses NWS data directly and can be found on f-droid[2] and g---le play.
Granted, Wx doesn't follow Material Design for Android in the slightest, but I like it that way because it's very information-dense, snappy, and light (unlike r--ct "native" and other JS toolkits out there).
I'm not sure, NWS does a good job of interpolating for regions without a weather station, even taking into account coastal effects and elevation. In my experience (in a rural, montane environment) it works pretty well if you specify your coordinates, not just the zipcode.
Have there any been any comparisons of the commercial services to NWS? That would be an interesting casual study.
I am. Spend some time in the desert southwest, particularly on indian reservations. You'll find that NWS temperatures are regularly off by 10-20°. But that's still better than Weather Underground, which can be off by as much as 50°.
One thing I will give the NWS credit for is the wind forecasts. Those things are spot-on at least 90% of the time.
I've lived in 15 cities in a dozen states, and what I've noticed is that if you're in a large city, or east of a large city, the forecasts are great.
But if you're west of a large city, or in a smaller city, it's hit-or-miss. This makes sense, as the better forecasters tend to end up in the larger markets.
I see. That's interesting, you may want to send those comments to your regional forecast office. They have several citizen-science programs like SKYWARN and their ham radio observers, that help them improve their regional forecasts.
Opposite experience here. Services like Dark Sky and Wunderground are so inaccurate up here in Alaska that it's dangerous. NWS is also often pretty wrong but way less wrong than anything else. Interesting to hear your
No. Almost every medium and large city in the United States was built because of its access to water and shipping. New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Houston, PORTland, Boston, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Charleston, and on and on and on.
Even smaller cities like Minneapolis, Buffalo, Sioux Falls, Albany, and hundreds more are located where they are because waterfalls and rapids made them the farthest extent of water travel before rapids or waterfalls or other hazards made the route too difficult.
You might be interested to know that private sector weather forecasting firms have a long history of lobbying to prevent NOAA/NWS from building its own end user services and apps [0].
I agree that NWS [text] forecasts are usually the best, though it can be time consuming to digest them. Nate Silver's book [1] makes the interesting point that commercial forecasts almost always reduce the quality of the input data they're given from NOAA, but that part of this boils down to incentives: Nobody complains if you forecast a small chance of rain and it turns out to be sunny. The problem spot is in ruining someone's picnic. Hence, forecasts tend to bias heavily towards rain.
I agree. I haven't found anything that compares to the old Weather Underground app's plot of weather data. It was such a brilliant way to convey so much data quickly and clearly.
After finding no substitutes, I started making my own weather app (for my own private use) this week to duplicate that functionality. But of course I was using the Dark Sky API which will now get shut down. I just can't win this one!
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.
NWS doesn't do regular daily/hourly forecasts beyond a week, but they do publish "extended range outlooks" which provide probabilities for precipitation and temperature in the 6-10 day and 8-14 day range. Pretty low-res in both temporal and geographical resolution, though, due to the uncertainties: https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/forecasts/extended_ra...
It's bonkers how bad all the weather apps are for Android.
I use Yr weather (from the Norwegian Broadcasting Institute and Meteorological Institute) which is... fine, but their source of data isn't great for my location.
Almost everything else I've tried is some combination of slow, poorly designed, or not-privacy-respecting, even if I'm willing to pay.
Hey, truly thanks for this. It's not Dark Sky, but it's not bad, and I never would've heard about it were it not for folks on HN. I'm getting good data for where I live, the UI is nice and clean. It's a start!
I came here to say this. No tracking, it's a public service and the UI is great. Thanks to the Norwegian Metereological Institute for making this available to everyone.
I really think this shows how direly we need "public interest" services on our phone.
Great information density, clean interface and has by the far the best widget of any weather app I've seen. It manages to display so much information with graphs without being visually overloaded.
Know of any apps like this that are available for iOS? I loved the old wunderground app's graphs and have been trying to find a replacement for ages...
It's literally bonkers to me how many people sell out. Is the VLC guy the only person with some integrity? Can we not be satisfied with the money we make from subscribers instead of selling everything including the kitchen sink to some corporate behemoth to swallow it up and kill every open service?
The same thing is happening in the podcasting ecosystem right now. it's turning more and more into a walled garden.
I used to think the same thing, but what about the situations where people don't sell out and just see their features copied by the corporate behemoth, wholesale? That scenario seems to play out often as well (g---le+ and diaspora always come to mind).
I suppose if the goal is to just see some technology or technique or idea become more broadly adopted, this isn't a bad thing. But what about poor-implementations of a good concept (UI/UX bloat, user-hostile business models, etc.) Honestly, I'm not sure. Is this analogous to the trends that drive consolidation of firms in general?
I guess this is a round-about say of saying that selling-out is probably the most rational thing to do, but please prove me wrong.
Large amounts of money offer much more tangible freedom than a moral victory, and can lead to many more moral victories down the line.
Alternatively, people just like money.
I'd much rather take whatever large amount of cash to basically ensure my needs and those of my future offsprings are taken care of for a very long time, if not for life.
I haven’t had that many conversations with founders, but I’ve had a few, and I suspect that like a lot of thing there’s a fiction that the hopeful believe and the entrenched have absolutely no incentive to correct. Not as bad as record labels for new bands, but not a whole lot better.
That fiction, if I have it right, is that selling your company is a merger. That you are a lesser peer and that you will still have a great deal of influence in the resulting company. And there are people who manage that, but most do not. And not only that, your payout is delayed and contingent on you keeping your former employees from getting too surly. Sometimes for several years.
And since your story was supposed to be about how much you sacrificed and how hard you worked to sell your company and became successful, are you really going to be frank and honest with yourself and those who ask, or are you going put on a brave face?
I wonder how many of the “money doesn’t buy happiness” nouveau-riche mean something like the problems listed above when they say that. “I reached my goal and it wasn’t what I wanted.”
My dad owns a base station that uploads data to WU and since the takeover I've not been able to get a proper API key to have him pull his own data from the WU API.
Luckily the base station is easy to scrape for the raw data locally, but still.
Try Carrot on iOS. It is really good. It is famous for its mini game and snarky robot comments that predict the weather. But the core weather is great and has the best interface.
Carrot, by default, uses the Dark Sky API. It's one of the few apps that lets you choose an alternate data source. Wunderground used to be the best choice, but that API vanished last year. With Dark Sky gone, none of the remaining options are particularly good, if you live in the USA.
I felt a little slighted (in a cheeky way) by the "zero good weather apps for Android" comment. Started writing then decided against it. Then I got this email in my inbox from a user :-)
Dark Sky is shuttering their Android app after being acquired by Apple. People are saying things like "Now I will have zero good weather apps for Android. "
I used to drive a convertible. I liked Dark Sky because I would get a warning notification if it was going to rain right were I was and I could go put the top up.
I haven't been able to find this type of notification in Flowx. Am I missing this, or by chance is it cmoing?
No, there are no notification. I plan to add a notification editor one day where you can configure any notification you want.
That said, the to-do list is super long so it might be a while before this feature is done. I depends on demand.
That said, Rainviewer is working on predicting rain from radar images for up to 2 hours ahead. Check them out and ask when this feature might appear. They might have beta testing and your situation sounds like a good test case.
I like the UI, and I'll commit for now, but the end game for the constant churn of useful weather apps is an open source app that can't be sold. Someday someone will offer you X dollars and you'd be a fool not to accept and us users will be doing this rodeo all over. Just remember us when your partying on your p-diddy yacht.
It has always provided the option to select between Dark Sky, Weather Bit or AccuWeather. So while Dark Sky may go away, at least there are two other options, and hopefully they'll add others in light of this news.
It's especially frustrating when two paragraphs above they said this:
> There is no better place to accomplish these goals than at Apple. We’re thrilled to have the opportunity to reach far more people, with far more impact, than we ever could alone.
So how exactly does cutting off literally billions of potential users allow them to "reach far more people"?
This is (selfishly) disappointing as I just built my first Twitter bot[0] using their API. At least it can be live in it's current form until EOY 2021.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 318 ms ] thread> 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.
I understand that Apple has no obligation to support a platform that is not their own, but this really hurts to hear after using Dark Sky on Android and the API for _years_
It's a crappy decision on their part, no doubt. But saying it should be illegal is way out of line.
If they made their own software and didn't put it on Android, sure. But this isn't it.
In this case, a platform buying up cross-platform software to eliminate support for competing platforms is clearly causing harm to consumers. In similar situations, a government might legislate to force companies to be either the pipe/platform or a content supplier but not both, to eliminate precisely this type of anti-consumer incentive.
Also, isn't the barrier between iOS and Android devices artificial? I don't see a veritable technical reason why the two platforms can't be compatible.
No, not even remotely. They are completely different operating systems.
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 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.
Vaguely topical thought: I wonder if we’re going to see a lot more of this. A large economic downturn means a lot of small, independent companies will struggle to survive. Being swallowed by a megacorp might be one of the few ways to keep something alive.
Everyone I know in Japan defaults to Map from Yahoo.
I wish they would keep that alive in even a limited way and keep all the fanciness to Apple at the very least.
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 their lawyers to drive Armstrong into debt in a protracted legal battle. This drove Armstrong to suicide by defenestration. For companies like Apple, these acquisitions are more about killing competition than they are about improving their own services or user interfaces.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Howard_Armstrong http://www.free-culture.cc/
Buy things and make them exclusive just so no one else can have them.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extingu...
That is in the case of Epic not the OP.
"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.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/03/31/apple-buys...
per https://twitter.com/ajblum/status/1245045062112813059
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
... 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.
I remember fondly using their Wunder Radio app in the early iPhone years.
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-weather-machine/
[1] https://hjelp.yr.no/hc/en-us/categories/200450271-About-Yr-t...
as an aside, my first thought at this phrase was that "he died by removing all the windows?" it took a second to process that properly.
but to the point, that's the kind of anti-competition we need to root out quickly. compete on merits, not on demerits.
i'm sad about the embark app, but i'm hoping that the dark sky integration means no more sending data (however "anonymized") to the shady data broker that is the weather channel.
The Defenestrations of Prague (Czech: Pražská defenestrace, German: Prager Fenstersturz, Latin: Defenestratio Pragensis) were three incidents in the history of Bohemia in which multiple people were defenestrated (thrown out of a window). The origin of the word "defenestrate" ("out of the window") is believed to come from the episodes in Prague in 1618 when the disgruntled Protestant estates threw two royal governors out of the castle window and wrote an extensive Apologia to this act.
For those who are extra slow like me: he killed himself by jumping out of a window.
I for one am super happy that people with this attitude have been totally unable to penetrate the medical devices field!
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/29/business/coronavirus-us-v...
TLDR: A $3000 ventilator was “on schedule to file for market approval in September 2013” and then Covidien bought out the competition to prevent it coming to fruition.
Is the value of the weather channel that investors expect the national weather service to be abolished?
i'd be super happy if they switched to the national weather service, but absent that, dark sky is more privacy preserving than the weather channel (who reportedly sell location data, for example).
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/11/25/weather-i...
"In 2017, Trump nominated Barry Myers, the former CEO of AccuWeather, a company that has advocated for the privatization of large parts of the National Weather Service, to lead NOAA. However, his nomination stalled, in part because of conflict-of-interest concerns since his family still owns the private forecasting company."
It certainly wouldn’t be profitable for Accuweather to have to do things like gather weather data and have supercomputers to analyze.
> For companies like Apple, these acquisitions are more about killing competition than they are about improving their own services or user interfaces
You definitely see this with not just Apple but any big tech company. Either they acquire a company for their tech, for their people who work there (talent), for their data or finally, just to be able to kill their company/product.
To make the list more complete I've seen large tech companies acquire another tech company for their users and/or their brand. Think about Microsoft buying Github or Skype.
Skype was almost certainly some sort of scheme to kill Skype and bring lawful intercept to the platform. Skype at one point owned consumer voip globally.
This is just nonsense.
Every acquisition they've ever done can directly be seen in future projects:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
The products you don't see give a hint into their roadmap.
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.
That said, I don't believe that to be the issue either. Death by a thousand cuts, maybe, but I seriously doubt closing off one app from the Android ecosystem is going to do any damage whatsoever. I think this is more about the acquisition of talent and nothing more.
But now it won't have to pay for API access anymore, since they'll own the whole backend.
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.
Not disagreeing with the following paragraph, but GP specifically asked about "access", and all of these iOS users already had access to Dark Sky; this strictly decreases access, even if more people end up using it.
>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.
This suggests that Apple may only buy to augment their product line; whilst still making the core experience worse for everyone overall.
I’ll admit I’ve not done a proper study of post-acquisition Shazam. I’m going on casual observation here.
Apple believes it should make/provide the whole “widget”. If they think every phone should ship with a really good weather app, they’ll do one. If one comes on the market that they think is better, they’ll buy it and make it the new default.
I mean they’re not in the weather app business. They aren’t competing against Dark Sky. What they’re competing against is Android, and if their phone comes with a stellar weather app out of the box, that is good for Apple. Others can continue to make weather apps.
iOS comes with a calculator. People still buy PC Calc and Calcbot despite the built-in being pretty useful.
I heard it was because Apple’s C-levels weren’t happy with any of the concepts for a calculator UX that fills the screen of an iPad - and they’re right, even the best iPad calculator there is (PCalc) feels weird to use just to do some quick sums because it fills up my 13-inch iPad Pro’s screen.
I remember some early fan-made concepts for the iPad had it running iPhone apps in floating windows - I think if Apple baked that functionality into the iPad OS from the beginning it would have meant a whole slew of small utility apps like the calculator, clocks and alarms, compass, etc wouldn’t need to be remade - but I’m sure they killed that idea because it wouldn’t motivate developers into making first-class iPad apps - and by “punishing” users with the terrible full-screen iPhone app mode it incentivises developers to put effort into making good native iPad apps - while at the same time making small utility apps an impossibility for iPad OS (though this doesn’t seem to have convinced Instagram...)
To be fair, they could exist now as a Today Screen widget, but then you can’t use it while you have another app open. It’s only with iOS 12+ multitasking support for slide-over and side-bar apps that a calculator app could now work - but it would still need to support full-screen mode - but we’re so close now! And given that, I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple did allow iPad apps to run only in sidebar or floating mode - but only if an app really won’t work as a full-screen app - and when/if they do, they’ll definitely launch their own calculator app.
Y’know the Apple Watch didn’t get a first-party calculator until 2019?
It's a terrible story and he was treated badly, but you're making it more dramatic than it was.
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.
I'm an otherwise happy tvOS, macOS and MBP (though Android-using) customer but I'm going to need to re-consider lest I get bitten again in the future.
Semi-related but for transit apps, I much prefer the dedicated "Transit" app over any of the mapping services.
https://transitapp.com/
It has great visualizations of nearby lines and departures, gives bike/walk/taxi alternative times, allows you to select which transit systems, much more customizable in route planning, alerts on stops, schedule changes, when to leave, and it utilizes live data from other riders on where a bus or train is if you're willing to share your location during your ride.
Worked well in every North American city I've been in with a transit system.
Have you tried Citymapper? It looks pretty similar in features and covers a different set of cities (there's some crossover but not as much as I'd of thought), might be useful.
They're all basically working with the exact same data, but I find Apple Map transit directions to be the easiest to use, providing I'm in one of the limited cities it supports.
I wrote my own little thing: https://jrock.us/mta.html. It just pulls the train arrival times for my home and work stations, the transfer stations along the way, and system-wide service advisories. It fits on one screen. The code is a trash fire (it's just jquery that injects raw HTML), but it works ;)
Yes but that's inline with what you'd expect Apple to do though. They won't support any non-Apple ecosystem unless they have to - it's just their way of doing things
Is it? Did Shazam stop working on Android when Apple ate it?
Honest question, since I don't have an Android device.
Shazam on Android is a net producer of data, while Dark Sky on Android is a net consumer of data.
I just wish they kept the API running though.
https://www.weather.gov/documentation/services-web-api
I'd argue the exact opposite. They keep pronouncing they're now a services company. If that's TRULY their go-forward model, they should be selling services to the broadest possible audience. Shutting it down to other audiences tells me they're still a hardware company that can't see past their walled garden.
If anyone at Apple is listening, I'll say it for the thousandth time: Support Messages on Android and Windows and you will own the messaging market. If you keep kicking the can, someone will eventually take it from you. Just look at Blackberry and what you did to them... it can and will happen to you as well. BES was thought to be an impenetrable wall. Narrator: It wasn't.
This coming from someone who switched back to iPhone after the last round of goog privacy snafu's.
It's not a matter of seeing past the walled garden. So long as there is a roadmap for deep platform integrations (identity, payments, AR, GPU, etc) and the desire for those integrations to be 100% available to _anyone_ with a blue bubble, the service will not leave Apple. IMO, it's about protecting the path of innovation while keeping a key feature (compatibility across all users) in play. Available is key because feature adoption spreads virally. Nobody wants to see someone do something in iMessage and then learn they can't do it.
But putting Messages on Android would level the playing field as well. It might give them the dominant messaging platform, at least outside a China, but so what? There’s no reason for them to care about that. They’re not Facebook.
And that player will need to be in the App Store, follow Apple's policies, and give them a cut of any IAPs. Either way, Apple wins.
iMessage just needs to have a better reputation than the built-in messenger for other platforms. It does _not_ need to beat all other messengers.
Messaging needs a network effect. The other alternative besides advertising is charging customers. Can you point to one successful platform that has a network effect and charges customers?
Microsoft Office (or maybe just Excel?) may qualify too, if VBScript is sufficient to label it as a platform.
This isn’t really true anymore…
Also for Office, what free alternatives were there when Office was gaining popularity?
Compare that to now. How did Windows Mobile work compared to Android?
To all the folks trying to make Swift server development compelling: please stop. Use Golang or Rust instead.
Apple is an antagonist of other platforms/ecosystems, and there's no reason to believe they won't use Swift to force developers to buy and run Macbooks.
Edit: Would the multitude of downvoters provide a counter argument? Why should we tolerate this behavior from Apple?
I'm upset when other companies use the same playbook. There's an equal opportunity for all companies to behave better here. As it stands, I do not support this.
Other than the fact that there has been no signs of this in the past five years?
If the API and apps were profitable, why did they sell to Apple?
How much did Dark Sky for Android cost? Was the 50th percentile revenue per Android user $0? Was the 90th percentile, too?
- Move to iOS - Apple Music - Beats - Shazam - Shazam Lite
I'm actually a little surprised they didn't release Apple TV+ for Android.
Profiles - https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Apple+Inc.&h... - https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Apple,+Inc.&...
This is one way Apple tries to lock people in, and it's really frustrating. This isn't an efficient market situation, this is a monopolist protecting their walled garden kingdom by slurping up the cross platform innovators. I'm terribly disappointed in the Dark Sky authors for doing this to long time loyal customers, no matter what their paychecks look like.
People are raising concerns over Apple buying a small company and shutting down its offerings to any platform that isn't Apple's.
Apple has a pattern of purchasing companies that already offer products on other platforms and immediately shutting all non-iOS products down.
Obviously, they're free to run their business however they want, but it's also understandable that fans of those products might be upset that their app (or APIs that power other apps they enjoy) are no longer available simply because Apple did "their usual thing". Many companies (including Apple in rare cases) maintain or even develop codebases for applications across more than one platform.
There's nothing wrong with Apple buying companies to shut them down. It just sucks for the end-users who no longer get to use those companies' products for the sole reason of "they got bought by Apple".
The EU, for example, aims its anti-competitive regulation towards firms who have a "dominant market position" rather than a "monopoly".
A monopoly exists when there is a single seller of a commodity. Copyrights and patents are government-granted monopolies.
A broader definition is that a monopolist is a provider that has pricing power - the ability to set prices.
Apple has a monopoly on the channel to deliver iOS apps. Anyone seeking to deliver an iOS app must accept Apple's terms, including Apple's cut of revenue.
That's only a monopoly in the same sense that McDonalds has a monopoly on Big Macs. It's within their own ecosystem. Customers can decide whether they want to buy into that ecosystem or choose an alternative (like Burger King, or Android).
Buying a burger is an independent transaction. Buying a Big Mac one day doesn't make you less likely to buy a Whopper the next.
Buying a phone is an investment that locks you into that ecosystem for ~2 years (until you buy a new one), and once that time comes, both ecosystems encourage you to stick with your existing choice via purchase transfers, exclusives, and (more) seamless data transfers.
Your comparison would only make sense in a world where McD and BK competed by lacing their burgers with different drugs to get you chemically addicted.
Fuck Apple, fuck Google, and fuck Tim Cook in particular. This is fucking depressing, and almost makes COVID seem appealing. At least it would take your mind off this bullshit for a while.
I think the best analogy would be video games on console platforms, does Sony have a 'monopoly' on PlayStation games? Well, kind of if you squint really hard, not that it seems to stand in the way of a vibrant and competitive console industry and that's the key issue. If there's a competitive market that is serving customer needs, and no deceptive practices so customers have a clear choice then it's hard to argue there's a market dysfunction such as a monopoly.
Yes? The whole console industry is equally awful, and does the same bullshit. That said, there used to be a few mitigating factors for consoles, but they have never been relevant for phones:
1. Generational incompatibility: Since console generations generally weren't backwards-compatible, every new generation would more or less reset the playing field.
2. You could have multiple consoles connected to your TV. You probably won't bring multiple phones with you every day.
"That's only a monopoly in the same sense that McDonalds has a monopoly on Big Macs. It's within their own ecosystem. Customers can decide whether they want to buy into that ecosystem or choose an alternative" (like living in the next town over, or solar power, water delivery, and portable toilets).
The fact that alternatives exist (live somewhere else! live disconnected!) does not negate the fact that the utility is a monopoly provider of those services.
The primary difference between utility monopolies and the iOS monopoly is that utilities are a "natural" monopoly (there are significant infrastructure costs to enter the market of providing running water to homes in a city) whereas the iOS monopoly is government-granted via copyrights and contracts and digital locks that exclude competitors, and those locks are again protected by DMCA copyright law.
There is no natural reason there cannot be a competing app store on iOS, except that Apple wants to preserve its monopoly.
Would you let a home builder dictate what food delivery options you have? Why let a phone builder dictate what software delivery options you have?
This occurred to me as well, almost as soon as the economic impacts of COVID-19 was apparent. And in particular that this will strenghen the power of large coporations that can weather the storm, at the expense of smaller companies, and competition.
I think the thing that frustrates me is that I've been a paying customer for a long time only for the parent purchaser to shut me out. Like I said, I'm glad for the founders, but as the parent here has stated - I highly doubt Apple will do much of anything with this.
That said I do wish there was a third option besides Apple and Google.
Android phones on the other hand at least have the option of installing a variant that is more privacy focused, such as Copperhead[1].
I can install F-Droid and follow some of the other recommendations on the Free Software Foundation website to "Free my Android"[2]. All without having to jailbreak my device.
Now, granted this is an expert action, but it allows people that care about it to accomplish it. Do you lose a lot of functionality? Sure, but all Security and Privacy is about trade-offs.
[1]: https://copperhead.co/android/ [2]: https://fsfe.org/campaigns/android/liberate.en.html
If you are willing to sacrifice privacy, why not go android? If you do not want to, you must buy an android phone and tweak it. Using Apple is but a compromise.
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.
https://github.com/apprenticeharper/DeDRM_tools
It's not because of iBooks, it's because Amazon would have to pay 30% to Apple if they sold through the app.
1. Sideload apps that my government has decided they don't like and want banned.
2. Use real firefox to support diversity on the web
3. Use open audio codecs like FLAC without tying myself in knots
It's not perfect but in the respects that really matter it's a lot more free.
https://vox.rocks/resources/ios-flac-player
And then there is that whole running an operating system written by a company whose whole m.o. is to invade your privacy.
Privacy and openness are two independent, orthogonal concepts. I agree Apple has a better overall story on privacy but I care more about openness, especially in the current political climate.
- The hope that iPhone 9 will not be a gigantic phone and it might actually be around the size of SE.
- There's nowhere to go to. Can't go back to generic Android. That's just a non-starter. There are no OEMs who supports a privacy focussed Android ROM and sends "timely" patches and OS upgrades (there are some niche ones but they will either never start direct service/support in my country or in a decade maybe).
Rumors point to a big phone :(
How can you say that on a day that they sold all the user data?
this is going to huge oil company consolidation now
It's a pissing match between MBS and Putin. MBS/SA wanted to increase production which lowers prices, Putin wanted to maintain current levels because lower prices let US shale oil back into the market.
Prices dropped to the mid USD 30s per barrel.
Then COVID-19 hit.
The result is that oil has dropped now to mid USD20s/barrel.
US shale oil producers are uneconomical below USD40/barrel.
The major upside for most employees is that they just got acquihired into Apple and they get to put that on their resume. Not everyone is so fortunate.
I'd really, really like a replacement on Android. While Wunderground could be it, it's unfortunately not. The app is heavy and crappy and ad-laden and weirdly non-nonsensical.
https://www.windy.com/
Dark Sky also does a fair job of showing general forecast and chances of things over the next week or so.
While I use Windy as an app for me to check and see what's going on, it's not nearly there on the prediction front. Much less notifications that help with "Woah -- heavy rain, time to head back to the car" or "Just a drizzle, cool, let's keep going".
https://www.saildrone.com/forecast
I don't think this feature is released yet but with this situation and support, they might work on it faster.
I don't understand how being acquired by Apple helps further that goal. Removing support for non-Apple devices seems to drastically lower the number of people who you are helping.
I am interested in seeing what happens to this service moving forward as it sounds like the API may be closed off completely by 2021 as well.
I would imagine that DarkSky will become the basis for the default weather apps in iOS and macOS, and the number of people who use those defaults is drastically higher than the number of people who use DarkSky iOS/Android as a third-party app. The total addressable market shrinks, but the functional number of users increases.
While I don't know what Dark Sky's paid base is, it's probably way smaller than that.
It's tempting to think you can just throw money at something and make it work. Unfortunately that's not how you build something great.
It doesn't. I will found a company just to have it acquired, so my press release can be:
> We had to choose between making shitloads of money, enough to not care about anything ever again, or let you continue seeing slightly more accurate weather. Guess what we chose, sucker! Thanks for giving us money, see you never.
This is not a universal constant, but it is something that unfettered capitalism idealizes.
Somehow it just feels like too much in too few hands.
Congratulations to Adam Grossman, though.
One thing this doesn't do: incentivise me to buy an iPhone.
"""
Effective: 7:00 PM CDT, March 30
Expires: 7:00 PM CDT, June 30
To continue using the app and receiving weather notifications, please update to the latest version. You can read more on our blog.
"""
How about "Apple just bought a really talented team of developers and want them to work on the Next Big Thing at Apple rather than spend their time on a product that doesn't do anything for Apple's strategy?"
In fact, Apple has released more apps for Android such as Apple Music in recent years.
That said - part of me is wondering, it's April 1st tomorrow. Part of me is REALLY hoping it is a joke too!
EDIT: Grammar!
And yet another functional API shut down and privatized. This is the way of the web now, a few companies owning the data, and nothing cool left to mess around with.
I can't be the only one who has noticed this trend happening for years. You used to be able to scroll to the footer of practically any service and find an API link. No more.
The data are public [1]. Dark Sky et al process and repackage those data, along with their own analytics and UI.
[1] https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/webservices/v2
Perhaps they expanded into repackaging NOAA data now, but that's not what Dark Sky is about.
I work on a related app to do that barometer data on Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.allclearwe... (US only for now).
They used an ML/statistical approach to forecasting, rather than physical modeling. They had some secret sauce in doing fast ML on phones, before libraries like CoreML existed.
AccuWeather has been doing that for ages with MinuteCast. Dark Sky just looked more 21st century and was better marketed, probably
DarkSky - Nov 2011 - https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jackadam/dark-sky-hyper...
MinuteCast - Mar 2014 - https://www.accuweather.com/en/press/24293762
That is, it's the exact opposite. MinuteCast is a rip of DarkSky.
See https://www.cnn.com/2017/10/14/politics/noaa-nominee-accuwea...
https://www.weather.gov/documentation/services-web-api
You can turn lat/long into a grid point:
https://api.weather.gov/points/39.7456,-97.0892
Then a grid point into a forecast:
https://api.weather.gov/gridpoints/TOP/31,80/forecast
If you have your own GIS you can presumably store the grid points yourself.
How did you get JSON? When I was looking I could only find XML, which I wasn't willing to deal with.
Shame it's US only...
But I wanted precipitation data so I had to use this endpoint: https://api.weather.gov/gridpoints/TOP/31,80
That endpoint groups hour-by-hour forecasts (see below) together to deduplicate data, but it makes it very painful to parse. For instance, "2020-03-31T15:00:00+00:00/PT4H" means that value is valid for 4 hours beginning at 2020-03-31T15:00:00+00:00. The durations varied from time interval to time interval and it made it super annoying to parse through.
{ "validTime": "2020-03-31T15:00:00+00:00/PT4H", "value": 0 }, { "validTime": "2020-03-31T19:00:00+00:00/PT1H", "value": 2 }, { "validTime": "2020-03-31T20:00:00+00:00/PT3H", "value": 4 },
Make it free to use for individuals, and with a reasonable cost for commercial use.
https://www.weather.gov/documentation/services-web-api
Thanks for nothing creators of Dark Sky.
source: I just deleted mine
FWIW I do this on Android in the US, expanding to iOS and internationally soon:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.allclearwe...
Am I the only one doing barometric pressure data research on Android now? Maybe IBM does it, it's also hard to say.
The areas of research that Dark Sky did not follow through with are disappointing. They seemed very focused on making math-statistics estimates of forecasts and never doing the real hard science.
Maybe Apple will pick up the slack.
Checking the policy in effect before the acquisition[1], it seems they disclosed the possibility of transferring data to an acquirer.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200311172542/https://darksky.n...
https://github.com/sxg/forecastio
> 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 apps for Android. Just so Apple can flex on Google, even though I was a paying customer for both. During a major pandemic when public services are heavily reduced and poor access to good weather apps could put people in danger.
Extremely disgusting and extremely horrible. Always feels great to know that my reward for supporting startups is to be cannon fodder to rounding errors at major corporations.
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.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.samruston....
Sadly at some point they weren't able to pay for the dark sky API anymore and since then the quality of forecasts is a bit less convincing. I'm still rather shocked by the low reviews though, for me it works well and I love that you can add a dozen cities and see the forecast.
Supposedly they're still fixing bugs from the new weather provider before it's made public, but it hasn't been updated in ten months. I doubt it will be improved anymore, and I don't really use it much since the new provider is mediocre at best.
If you are in the United States, nothing beats getting the forecast straight from the horses mouth (NWS that is). Some companies are notorious for producing 30+ day forecasts, which can't have any meaningful levels of skill.
NOAA/NWS should just create their own mobile application. I use Wx[1], which parses NWS data directly and can be found on f-droid[2] and g---le play.
Granted, Wx doesn't follow Material Design for Android in the slightest, but I like it that way because it's very information-dense, snappy, and light (unlike r--ct "native" and other JS toolkits out there).
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19775291
[1]: https://gitlab.com/joshua.tee/wx
[2]: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/joshuatee.wx/
Your blanket statement doesn't always hold. This is more accurate.
Have there any been any comparisons of the commercial services to NWS? That would be an interesting casual study.
Edit: There are some additional interesting comments downthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22740480
I am. Spend some time in the desert southwest, particularly on indian reservations. You'll find that NWS temperatures are regularly off by 10-20°. But that's still better than Weather Underground, which can be off by as much as 50°.
One thing I will give the NWS credit for is the wind forecasts. Those things are spot-on at least 90% of the time.
I've lived in 15 cities in a dozen states, and what I've noticed is that if you're in a large city, or east of a large city, the forecasts are great.
But if you're west of a large city, or in a smaller city, it's hit-or-miss. This makes sense, as the better forecasters tend to end up in the larger markets.
Even smaller cities like Minneapolis, Buffalo, Sioux Falls, Albany, and hundreds more are located where they are because waterfalls and rapids made them the farthest extent of water travel before rapids or waterfalls or other hazards made the route too difficult.
I agree that NWS [text] forecasts are usually the best, though it can be time consuming to digest them. Nate Silver's book [1] makes the interesting point that commercial forecasts almost always reduce the quality of the input data they're given from NOAA, but that part of this boils down to incentives: Nobody complains if you forecast a small chance of rain and it turns out to be sunny. The problem spot is in ruining someone's picnic. Hence, forecasts tend to bias heavily towards rain.
[0]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-06-14/trump-s-p...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Signal_and_the_Noise
It's beautifully designed, has an excellent selection of widgets, and is open source.
You can even set your lock screen to be a live wallpaper of the current weather.
[1] https://github.com/WangDaYeeeeee/GeometricWeather/
After finding no substitutes, I started making my own weather app (for my own private use) this week to duplicate that functionality. But of course I was using the Dark Sky API which will now get shut down. I just can't win this one!
I never used the WU app, but I do use the WU website regularly and feel that it is very slow and spammy and bad UI, etc., etc.
The problem is, I cannot find anyone else to give me a 10 day forecast.
How can I tease out a 10-day forecast from weather.gov ?
You could also use the NOAA's global weather simulations, some of which go out to 16 days: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/model-data/model-datas...
I use Yr weather (from the Norwegian Broadcasting Institute and Meteorological Institute) which is... fine, but their source of data isn't great for my location.
Almost everything else I've tried is some combination of slow, poorly designed, or not-privacy-respecting, even if I'm willing to pay.
I really think this shows how direly we need "public interest" services on our phone.
Great information density, clean interface and has by the far the best widget of any weather app I've seen. It manages to display so much information with graphs without being visually overloaded.
But please, let's not tell anyone else about this - I am tired of my favorite apps always getting ruined.
The same thing is happening in the podcasting ecosystem right now. it's turning more and more into a walled garden.
I suppose if the goal is to just see some technology or technique or idea become more broadly adopted, this isn't a bad thing. But what about poor-implementations of a good concept (UI/UX bloat, user-hostile business models, etc.) Honestly, I'm not sure. Is this analogous to the trends that drive consolidation of firms in general?
I guess this is a round-about say of saying that selling-out is probably the most rational thing to do, but please prove me wrong.
What is the purpose behind "censoring" Google's name here...?
Alternatively, people just like money.
I'd much rather take whatever large amount of cash to basically ensure my needs and those of my future offsprings are taken care of for a very long time, if not for life.
That fiction, if I have it right, is that selling your company is a merger. That you are a lesser peer and that you will still have a great deal of influence in the resulting company. And there are people who manage that, but most do not. And not only that, your payout is delayed and contingent on you keeping your former employees from getting too surly. Sometimes for several years.
And since your story was supposed to be about how much you sacrificed and how hard you worked to sell your company and became successful, are you really going to be frank and honest with yourself and those who ask, or are you going put on a brave face?
I wonder how many of the “money doesn’t buy happiness” nouveau-riche mean something like the problems listed above when they say that. “I reached my goal and it wasn’t what I wanted.”
Luckily the base station is easy to scrape for the raw data locally, but still.
Dark Sky is shuttering their Android app after being acquired by Apple. People are saying things like "Now I will have zero good weather apps for Android. "
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22740331
Flowx is better than Dark Sky!
I haven't been able to find this type of notification in Flowx. Am I missing this, or by chance is it cmoing?
That said, the to-do list is super long so it might be a while before this feature is done. I depends on demand.
That said, Rainviewer is working on predicting rain from radar images for up to 2 hours ahead. Check them out and ask when this feature might appear. They might have beta testing and your situation sounds like a good test case.
[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=widget.dd.com....
> There is no better place to accomplish these goals than at Apple. We’re thrilled to have the opportunity to reach far more people, with far more impact, than we ever could alone.
So how exactly does cutting off literally billions of potential users allow them to "reach far more people"?
Everyone has a price.
[0] https://twitter.com/EmojiWeatherVI