Apple acquired the acclaimed weather app Dark Sky in March 31, 2020. Apple claims that Dark Sky’s features have been integrated into Apple Weather which the company says offers hyperlocal forecasts for your current location, including next-hour precipitation, hourly forecasts for the next 10 days, high-resolution radar, and notifications. So, why is Apple’s Weather app still so reliably wrong?
For the last seven weekends in New York City, it has rained… Over this time, this relentless weekend-only rain has also affirmed that Apple’s weather app is pretty much useless. Personally, I’ve learned that the app cannot distinguish between “light rain” and “rain,” that the percentages it spits out feel bogus, and to never trust it when it tells you what time the rain will stop. I’m not alone. My friends and coworkers also have various stories about how the app has let them down, or how sometimes it just won’t work. Some even talk about Dark Sky, a weather-forecasting app that Apple bought in 2020, with a mournful, wistful sadness, like a lost love. Apple says Dark Sky’s most beloved features have been integrated into its app, but Dark Sky fans aren’t convinced. Things were different then, they say. Things were better.
My growing frustration spurred me to find out why Apple’s weather app stinks. In speaking to experts, I was comforted by the fact that there’s actually a reason — algorithms, specifically — for my annoyance. It’s nice to be mad at something in particular. But in my search I also discovered newfound appreciation for local meteorologists and more about weather and weather forecasting than I had initially planned…
MacDailyNews Take: Maybe we’re just delusional, but Dark Sky worked noticeably better than Apple’s Weather app does now, so, if true, Apple can’t be using Dark Sky’s algorithms and methods, somebody at Apple must have “improved” something somewhere (to the point where we don’t even use Apple’s Weather app anymore).
If Apple today brought back Dark Sky exactly as it was when they bought it, unchanged, we and millions of others would immediately download and use it daily.
Dark Sky was uncannily accurate. When it said told us was going to rain in 10 minutes, it rained in 10 minutes. So, if Apple integrated Dark Sky into Weather, why doesn’t Weather work even remotely as well as Dark Sky? Did Apple change the data sources that were fed into Weather when they turned off Dark Sky? Is this a GIGO case, Garbage In, Garbage Out? Or is something else broken inside Apple’s Weather app? – MacDailyNews, August 23, 2023
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Of all the weather companies out there that Apple could have acquired, they had to get one with a radar that stinks, and really doesn’t show what you need to know “at a glance” like what the company drills into their developer’s heads while they’re learning how to make an app., especially for the iOS version.
I use the Weather app all the time and it is almost always right. It is way better than Apple’s Green Weather Forecasting, which is insane. And so is the Gender Forecasting, which is depraved. And so is its employees Political Donations, which I forecast myself and am always right, 99.99% of the time. They donate to people who really like Karl Marx.
Dark Sky was amazingly accurate and timely on their perditions of when precipitation was starting and stopping.
I use the weather app and hate. 1. It’s highly inaccurate. 2. Too much eye candy.
Please bring back Dark Sky.
“somebody at Apple must have “improved” something somewhere (to the point where we don’t even use Apple’s Weather app anymore).”
There’s a lot of ‘improvements’ like that at Apple these days…Improved to the point of useless.
For temps the app works fine, but I’ve been looking outside at heavy rain falling and the app says no chance of rain today. I use other weather apps for a more accurate prediction of rain e.g. yahoo’s app.
I like just looking at Dark Sky, let alone it’s forecasting. Apple’s strong rating in the “taste” category would seems to imply that could AT LEAST keep it as it was. A downgrade makes no sense.