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In Wake of Apple Acquisition, Dark Sky Ends Android Support (arstechnica.com) 100

Posted by BeauHD from the end-of-the-road dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: As promised, popular weather app Dark Sky ended support for Android and Wear OS over the weekend. Android Dark Sky users report that the app is no longer working and that it presents the user with a message saying that the "app has shut down." The impending shutdown was first announced when Apple acquired the company in March of this year. Despite the end of support for the world's most popular mobile operating system, Dark Sky's developers wrote in a blog post announcing the acquisition that joining Apple means they could "reach far more people, with far more impact, than we ever could alone."

The Dark Sky Android app is not the only popular service on the chopping block as a result of the acquisition. Several app developers on both iOS and Android have used Dark Sky's API for weather data for a while now, but like Android support, that's going away. There's a little more time in that case, though: developers have until the end of next year to find and implement alternative data sources. When the acquisition was first announced, Dark Sky was slated to stop working on Android on July 1. That deadline was extended by one month, but it went into effect as planned on August 1. The Web version of Dark Sky was scheduled to end today, but Apple has extended that deadline, though embeds have been disabled. A new date for the Web shutdown has not been specified. That version will remain an option for Android users for now until it, too, stops working.
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In Wake of Apple Acquisition, Dark Sky Ends Android Support More

In Wake of Apple Acquisition, Dark Sky Ends Android Support

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  • What's the goto weather app for android? (Score:4, Informative)

    by schwit1 ( 797399 ) on Monday August 03, 2020 @10:37PM (#60363303)

    I used to use Weather Underground, but it got bought by IBM. They redesigned it so badly that it's rating went from 4.6 to 3.0 in no time flat.

    • NOAA Weather Radar Live. NOAA has a bunch of apps. Most have adware or paid version.

      I like this one because it shows lightning strike locations. Data comes from NOAA.
      E

      • No, NOAA has no apps.
        There are a ton of apps using NOAA/NWS data. Almost every weather app uses NOAA data, but they're not in the app business, and DO NOT charge for apps. They're a tax-supported service of the US Government.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by LubosD ( 909058 )

      Windy (www.windy.com)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Layzej ( 1976930 )

      I used to use Weather Underground, but it got bought by IBM. They redesigned it so badly that it's rating went from 4.6 to 3.0 in no time flat.

      Then they stopped supporting their free API... so I switched to dark sky. :( Dark Sky API still seems to be working on my Raspberry Pi, but I'm not sure for how long.

      Anyone know of a free alternative?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by kalpol ( 714519 )
        Weatherbit seems to be one that works with Kodi. For Android, NOAA Weather and MyRadar are both good, I use them both because I like MyRadar's radar and wind map better but NOAA has better forecasts than pretty much anyone.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      If you have Google Assistant already then it has a decent built in weather app with widgets.

      Some people like Windy, it's certainly pretty. I'd steer clear of the BBC Weather app because it uses the Met Office data which is rubbish.

    • Why do people need apps for weather? Ok it might be 1 step faster than bookmarking a weather page, but I still don't get it.

      BTW I don't blame IBM, I blame the weather channel, weather channel bought weather underground then went on to kill off the Intellicast weather website which I thought was far superior to weather underground - which sucks now. IBM didn't enter the picture until after weather channel ruined competing websites that it acquired either defunct (Intellicast) or suck (weather underground)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sjames ( 1099 )

        The Weather Underground app at least worked as advertised until IBM got it's tendrils in to it. Now even the remaining features are harder to use, provide less readable information, or just don't work at all.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kalpol ( 714519 )
      NOAA Weather, paid version, is really good, and I supplement the radar with MyRadar.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by deKernel ( 65640 )

      Plus their website now seem PAINFULLY slow to me. I migrated over once the whole Intellicast merger, but now I just go straight to the NOAA website.

    • I used to use Weather Underground, but it got bought by IBM. They redesigned it so badly that it's rating went from 4.6 to 3.0 in no time flat.

      Same here. WU was a nice app. Why do companies buy stuff and immediately ruin it?

    • Same here. It presented the weather info clearer than anything else, plus I also liked that I could get my local conditions from a nearby backyard weather station a few blocks away instead of from the airport over 10 miles away.

      But like so many other users, I dropped it after the greedy redesign. Make people pay for features that previously were free, blow away usability, block the old good version from working, and bumping up the price from $10/forever to $30/year is now how you keep users.
      BTW, it's rate

    • I started using Weather Underground when it was a telnet service!
      It was great until The Weather Company bought it and bastardized it
    • I never used Weather Underground because I only care about the weather above ground.

  • ...Android Dark Sky users report that the app is no longer working and that it presents the user with a message saying that the "app has shut down."...

    I've never heard of this app at all!

    Put another way, the app went dark on Android users. There are hundreds of weather apps, though.

    Anything special about this app?

    • > Anything special about this app?

      it used a different forecast model. That's why Apple didn't buy any of the others.

      iPhones will have better weather than Android for a little while.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by rtb61 ( 674572 )

        What the hell you talking about. They all just download data from various government weather departments. Some localise the data using regular folk weather stations but that is really unreliable, how well are they located to avoid extremely locale weather conditions, how accurate are they and they forecast nothing just make it more local but more unreliable (if you want it that locale buy and install your own remotely monitored weather station).

        Why them, probably the most popular one, they could buy out ch

        • Their concept is algorithmic micro weather forecasting, IIRC. They might take government data as a base, but localize somehow.

          For certain places, it can make a huge difference. San Francisco comes to mind for that...

          • They also leveraged barometric pressure sensors in phones to help their local targeting. So, using tens of thousands of mini weather stations to fill in data. Because of that, Dark Sky was able to give notifications that it would start raining at your location a few minutes beforehand.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

              Wait, are radar based rain maps a new thing in weather forecasting?

              I had them in my rain up for many years. This sounds like it simply overlays predictive rain map with your location, and if there's a match, it pushes a notification.

              • Re: What's so special about this app? (Score:5, Informative)

                by tysonedwards ( 969693 ) on Tuesday August 04, 2020 @05:05AM (#60364139)
                Not new, but their claimed secret sauce was to leverage barometric pressure changes from end user devices as a predictor for rain before it starts as a supplement for traditional radar mapping. Anecdotally, their app was very accurate with those “will rain / snow within 2 minutes” as soon as you walk outside or are near an open window. Whereas when you are in an office building, you only get the general region alerts. Not that it matters anymore since their app no longer works.

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

                  Ah, so this is a functionality for more expensive lines of phones only, where phone is equipped with a pressure sensor.

                  • Barometric sensor usually comes with the GPS.

                    https://medium.com/all-about-s... [medium.com]

                    • Re: (Score:2)

                      by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

                      The opposite is true. Pressure sensors come with higher cost for very little benefit, and most GPS equipped phones do not have them, nor do they actually need them. The claim in the story you're citing is that "best results for determining altitude are achieved by having everything", which is true. Having everything is also very expensive, and pressure sensor is largely useless with very few uses. It needs constant calibration, and it serves no meaningful purpose for detecting altitude for non-flying entiti

                    • They have it because it speeds up GPS acquisition. Because it's also a MEMs sensor it's easy to include.

                    • Re: (Score:2)

                      by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

                      GPS acquisition speed on modern modules is nearly instantaneous. Whatever benefit you're talking about is irrelevant beyond benchmarking.

                      And there are a lot of things that are "easy to include". The basic tenet of engineering is that you choose which things of those that are "easy to include" that you should exclude from said product, because value of this "easy to include" thing is too low to be worth it. Pressure sensor is among those things in all but the more expensive handsets today.

                    • Yea.. no. A huge swath of cellphones come with barometers, and have done for years.. and not simply flagship phones, not by a long shot. There's several reasons; yes, it does accelerate GPS acquisition, however the main purpose is increasing GPS accuracy. Having a secondary source of altitude information allows for higher-accuracy GPS fixes by serving as a correction factor. If you don't understand why, there's plenty of articles explaining. This is especially important for indoor GPS, which is increasingly

                    • Re: (Score:2)

                      by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

                      "A huge swath of expensive high end phones, that have existed for years as a social status symbol". Indeed.

                      And I get the feeling that you haven't used a less than very expensive phone in a long time, as indoors location systems have worked just fine for a long time on them.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by kenh ( 9056 )

          I don't think Apple bought a multi-platform weather app to 'drive a stake' thru the Android user community and increase android users switching to iOS!

          If Apple wanted to kill off Android, their first salvo wouldn't be "buy a weather app that runs on Android and then kill it!" It might be something like "offer cheaper hardware", offer software translation services, woo app developers, etc.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by gl4ss ( 559668 )

            Apple does already offer cheapo hardware they sell brand new though. It's all the old models - this way they can pretend for american customers that there's no cheapo iphones.

            Apple still sells 6s plus. brand new. around 250 bucks. in asia. It's pretty weird, but there it is sitting on operators web pages and stores.

            Apple just bought it because they thought it was good or fun or whatever though.

            and actual cheapo phones are like 80 bucks and as good as that iphone 6s anyways..

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Dunbal ( 464142 ) *
            Or maybe - get more than 6% global market share... Apple "killing off" Android is about as ludicrous as an ant dreaming it can single-handedly take down an elephant.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by sjames ( 1099 )

            I don't think Apple bought a multi-platform weather app to 'drive a stake' thru the Android user community and increase android users switching to iOS!

            So what's your alternative at least as likely explanation for them buying a multi-platform weather app and then ripping out perfectly functional support for platforms other than theirs?

      • it used a different forecast model. That's why Apple didn't buy any of the others.

        There are multiple forecast models used throughout the world with multiple datasets. Dark Sky isn't some magical thing which NOAA couldn't figure out. They are not unique in what they do.

      • Yeah, it had minute by minute rain forecast. I.E: Rain starting in 17 minutes and ending in 42. Was super helpful for outdoor activities like camping or hiking. Accuweather has minutecast with a similar model that I recently tested while camping, was very accurate.

    • Anything special about this app?

      The thing that made Dark Sky stand out from other weather apps, is that it offered some predictive abilities you don't find in many other weather apps.

      For instance, it would send a push notification if it was going to rain in your area very soon, using location services to be very fine-grained about the notice given to you.

      Possibly the main attraction though, was that you could see predictive weather radar for about the next hour or so - to see the general trend of storms dev

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ninjaz ( 1202 )

      The special thing about Darksky for my use was that it would play a chime when rain was imminent in an exact location and had a widget with a bar chart meter showing how heavy the rain would be over the upcoming hour or so in fine-grained increments. It was great for getting an idea at a glance of whether it would be worth it to wait a few minutes for the rain to let up before going outside and when to check if the car windows were rolled up.

      So far, I have found Accuweather with a similar 2 hour rain meter

      • The special thing about Darksky for my use was that it would play a chime when rain was imminent in an exact location and had a widget with a bar chart meter showing how heavy the rain would be over the upcoming hour or so in fine-grained increments.

        So basically what Accuweather introduced in its last update.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ninjaz ( 1202 )

          Not really, but I did just notice that Accuweather has a text widget. I saw the widget showing "Rain may form in the next 47 minutes", but opening the app, it reported that rain may form in the next 11 minutes. Not sure why they were that far apart.

          Darksky has a meter that catches the eye when looking down at the phone and audible alerts when it's going to rain. That's what really makes the app for me - alerts and indications of rain I didn't know to expect. I am in the market for an app with that funct

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by pat888 ( 2188172 )
      It was very accurate for showing if it's going to rain in the next hour

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Dunbal ( 464142 ) *
      Another one of these "billion dollar" companies that essentially does nothing except repackage publicly available data into a shiny app. No one ever realized that the dot com boom would come back and be here to stay.
      • And what's wrong with that? Sounds like transforming public information that isn't presented all that well originally into something more usable is a value-adding process.

  • Several app developers on both iOS and Android have used Dark Sky's API for weather data for a while now, but like Android support, that's going away.

    Unless there is some very special proprietary data from their API not available elsewhere, one would hope those app developers had minimal foresight to at least write a thin abstraction layer between the Dark Sky data model and their application model.

    If yes, start rewiring against one of the many weather APIs and move on.

  • to break up big tech

  • Go with the Pros (Score:5, Informative)

    by swell ( 195815 ) <jabberwock@poetic.com> on Monday August 03, 2020 @11:18PM (#60363415)

    There are many 'weather services'. They may offer compelling perks of some kind. I don't know, I never see them. I do know that the weather girls on the local TV stations tend to be very attractive in an erotic way.

    I check the weather at https://forecast.weather.gov/ [weather.gov] . This is the US government sponsored forecasting agency, NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration). They have invested billions of dollars in computers, software and satellites so that we can have the best information available.

    If your favorite weather source has similar resources then by all means, take advantage of that! If, instead, it is a typical internet resource that simply copies the NOAA data and adds commercial content and spyware, maybe you should reconsider.

    • There are many 'weather services'. They may offer compelling perks of some kind. ... If your favorite weather source has similar resources then by all means, take advantage of that! If, instead, it is a typical internet resource that simply copies the NOAA data and adds commercial content and spyware, maybe you should reconsider.

      Yes, but shouldn't your title be Why Pay for What You Can Get for Free?

      In this case, the "pros" are the services you are suggesting are more than most people need.

      Right reasoning, but you got the wrong end of the maxim.

    • There isn't "many 'weather services'" they all get there data from NOAA.
      The government owns the satellites - the data goes to NOAA servers and then the various weather services buys access.

    • I just go to google search and type: weather [location] not sure why I need an app, I just wanna know temperature and if it rains/cloudy/sunshine

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by _merlin ( 160982 )

      Yeah, I use www.bom.gov.au for Australia, and the local government meteorology service whenever I'm overseas. I've never wanted an app to make it more complicated. My wife uses a newspaper web site rather than going straight to the bureau's site for some reason, but that's just another layer of crap when all you want is observations/forecast.

    • This! most (all?) services get their data from NOAA. And most of those just regurgitate that data with no forecasting of their own.

      Remember when the local TV weather stations had someone that actually had an opinion on that data catered to the viewing area instead of just regurgitating what the national weather service predicted? There was one in the local area that would actually apologize the day following a big miss on his weather prediction. Yes weather is better predicted now, however anyone can rea

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by antdude ( 79039 )

      Are there any weather iOS apps and web sites that are even accurate? Each one seems to be different in its predictions and sometimes currently (e.g., yesterday morning said foggy but it was sunny in Apple's Weather (using The Weather Channel's datas), Weather Underground, and Weather Mate. :(

    • You're going to have to find another source when Flash stops working at the end of this year.

  • I say this as someone who's stuck with Android for 12 years, that these aren't services, they're paid apps by private companies and these companies have a perfect right to control how their company and it's products operate. They gave notice back in March that this would happen for Andoid version. This sort of thing happens all the time and it never makes news, companies stop supporting certain parts of their business for various reasons, most try to be reasonable and give customers time to switch.

    A private

    • I say this as someone who's stuck with Android for 12 years, that these aren't services, they're paid apps by private companies and these companies have a perfect right to control how their company and it's products operate.

      That’s kind of a simplistic view of things. I mean, there are all kinds of restrictions on how things are allowed to operate ... it’s not as simple as “it mine, me do what want”. Even though the TOS’s contain 1,000 uses of the term “we are not resp

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ninjaz ( 1202 )

        I assume the app was free and a bunch of Android users didn’t buy it in July then get stiffed?

        My most recent yearly payment went through in April and was refunded in its entirety, so I got four months free.

  • Amazing (Score:2)

    by kenh ( 9056 )

    The impending shutdown was first announced when Apple acquired the company in March of this year.

    Let's see, March, April, May, June, July - so they announced the shut down about five months ago, is anyone surprised?

    Despite the end of support for the world's most popular mobile operating system, Dark Sky's developers wrote in a blog post announcing the acquisition that joining Apple means they could "reach far more people, with far more impact, than we ever could alone."

    Merely being on "the world's most popular mobile operating system" doesn't make them a dominant player on the Android platform - there are countless apps also on "the world's most popular mobile operating system," yet they only have a few dozen downloads.

    Are you really questioning that by becoming part of Apple they will have access and resources that are better than they had on their own?

  • You are excluding a group, not because it is inferior or harming yoh, but because of a stupid ideology. Thereby limiting your own options, passing over any case where the best choice would come from that group, and hence, harming yourself.

    This is what this is. All they do, is harm themselves, because they've ben bought into a slave relwtionship.

    If Dark Sky was a human, it woukd be the gimp in a Nazi SM relationship that has all the signs of abuse on a criminal level.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Dunbal ( 464142 ) *
      Enforcing scarcity is a business model - it has been ever since someone decided to put a fence around an event and charge for entry.
    • Er what? Apple not supporting Android is not because of "stupid ideology". It is a choice a business decides on what they will support. In this case, there are so many weather apps you can still get on Android and this wasn’t the most popular as far as I could tell.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Public information (Score:3)

    by VeryFluffyBunny ( 5037285 ) on Tuesday August 04, 2020 @05:40AM (#60364193)

    You do realise that weather & forecasts are public information gathered & analysed by the government paid for by the tax payer, don't you? All weather apps do is relay the info to you, inject advertising, & put up paywalls. You can just bookmark your favourite public weather page & some public weather services even have their own apps.

    Please don't give these people your money for information that you've already paid for.

  • Rainvewer.com is device agnostic, and provides more radar coverage than any other app out there, including Dark Sky. I don't work for RainViewer, but I use it especially while traveling
  • After downloading it out of curiosity a couple of years ago, I never understood the hype surrounding this app. It's just another weather app, no better, no worse, than dozens of other weather apps for Android. After using it for a few days I forgot about it, for there are quite a few others that I like better. Like I said, good riddance.

    • It's markedly better for at least a few things, not least of which is predicting when it's going to rain or whatever in your area. It makes it possible to make plans or decisions within a short timeframe.

      For instance, I live about a 15 minute walk away from home (when I'm at the office). With Dark Sky, I can look at the weather and see if it's a good idea to walk home now, or if I should wait because I'll be caught in a squall if I don't.

      I'm running the iOS 14 public beta, and it's clearly using the new Dar

  • Those apps don't have their own satellites and merely monetize public data our taxes paid for. In the US I've bookmarked NOAA for my zip code for many years on PC and phone. There are a variety of options. The "standard version" doesn't use Flash :

    https://radar.weather.gov/ridg... [weather.gov]

    https://www.weather.gov/wrn/mo... [weather.gov]

  • Accuracy issues (Score:4, Informative)

    by Dan East ( 318230 ) on Tuesday August 04, 2020 @09:17AM (#60364785) Journal

    I've been using the Dark Sky API for a couple years now, and pretty regularly come across gross inaccuracies that are downright embarrassing to have in my app. Years ago, Dark Sky was funded on kickstarter, and thus they provided information on what they were doing and how they were doing it. Basically, the gist of it is they take weather data, primarily in the form of radar, satellite and temperature map imagery, and they interpolate it into smaller minutely (that is "minute" as in 60 seconds is a minute) steps. So their radar animations are smoother because they are per-minute. They then extrapolate the image animations into the future, again, keeping per-minute steps. The primary thing they are doing is applying image processing algorithms (such as those used to morph between two images) to weather map imagery. Then they map image pixels to specific geographic points, and produce a minutely forecast based on that. For example, "light rain starting in 13 minutes, lasting for 25 minutes" or "Partly cloudy for the hour". They provide that minutely forecast for the next 60 minutes. They were one of the very first apps producing minutely forecast products of that nature, although I see now that most other weather apps now also have minutely precision. So the competition has caught up.

    The big problem with their methodology is that since it isn't actually based on any kind of forecast model, and simply the map imagery, it uses extremely naive methods to determine the precipitation type. IE, if the ground-level temp is freezing or below, then that is snow. If it is warmer, then it is rain. On multiple occasions I have seen entire days where they had the precipitation type totally backwards (and both ways - they said it was snow when it was rain, and vice versa). That probably works okay for areas that are either normally pretty hot or pretty cold, but for temperate areas like where I live, the precipitation type is much more complex and mixed during winter. I have literally looked out the window and seen 6" of fresh snow accumulate throughout the day, while the Dark Sky continuously reported rain in their minutely forecast.

    Either way, their API rates are quite high, so that even though they provide minutely forecasts, you cannot poll data at nearly that high a rate without paying a fortune. At least not if your app supports more than a handful of geographic points.

  • I have a daemon running that ingests the XMPP feed from the NOAA Weather Wire Service [weather.gov] and populate my own database with live data (started with Postgres, but now using CouchDB as a document store is a little more appropriate for this) and have a simple REST API for my own applications.
  • This is exactly the sort of behavior that Apple should get investigated for.

    It's anti-competitive. Their iPhones should lure customers on their own merits, not because Apple is killing apps on Android.

    Make your phones better! There was a time where you had to be stupid to buy an Android, because they were crap.

    Well, they're less crap now, and iPhones are WAY more crap than they used to be.
    • First you must demonstrate a greater harm to consumers than one app ending. From what I can tell this isn’t the only or most popular weather app on Android. One of the first criteria if antitrust is violated is if suitable alternatives exist. If they do, then it fails a legal test.

  • The Dark Sky service provides an API that is used by many sites and apps.

    As an amateur astronomer living in a cloudy region, I wrote a service to forecast the hourly sky conditions (clouds, temperature, humidity, visibility), and it draws data from Dark Sky, as well as YR.no [www.yr.no], the Norway weather service. So far, both are still working. Not sure for how long.

    There are also other apps and services, e.g. Arcus is such one web site (Kitchener, Ontario [darksky.net]), and they also have an Android App.

    Both are working for the

  • How many fucking weather mapes does a person need? There are only so many weather stations in the world.
  • What The Forecast.

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