The tragic demise of a weather app that was too good
I’ve used a lot of apps in my life, but many don’t stand the test of time. A few apps, however, are abandoned, not because they are bad, but because they are outdated. too good. This is unfortunately what happened to one of my favorite apps.
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Dark Sky was the best weather app I’ve ever used
I’ve tried many weather apps over the years. Some of them were okay, some of them were horrible. The current options are so bad that I had to create my own weather widget using shortcuts.
There was, however, one weather app that I really loved: Dark Sky. It was unlike any other weather app I’ve ever used. It displays its data beautifully, with smooth, curved graphs showing the intensity of upcoming rain, radar maps with colored overlays showing the likelihood of rain, and a simple timeline showing rain chances and intensity throughout the day.
However, the best feature by far was its hyperlocal, up-to-the-minute rain alerts. You’d get an alert telling you it was going to start raining at your place in three minutes, and more often than not, that’s exactly what would happen. Honestly, it felt a little like magic at times.
Dark Sky was a paid app, but it was well worth it. Once I discovered Dark Sky, I couldn’t imagine using any other weather app. How wrong I was.
Apple’s hyperlocal weather just doesn’t add up
In 2020, Apple announced that it had acquired Dark Sky. By 2023, the Dark Sky app and API service were completely gone. Apple integrated Dark Sky technology into its own Weather app and implemented WeatherKit, a weather data service that developers could use to replace the Dark Sky API.
I was worried when I first heard the news because Apple doesn’t have a good track record when it comes to app acquisitions. Siri is a good example; Apple’s voice assistant started life as a third-party app, was acquired by Apple, and has been horribly stagnant ever since. We’re still waiting for the long-promised Siri updates that are supposed to make the voice assistant smarter.
When Apple’s Weather app added Dark Sky features in iOS 15 and iOS 16, my fears were confirmed. Hyperlocal weather alerts were nowhere near as good as they had been in Dark Sky. Even today, the weather notifications on my iPhone rarely match my local conditions.
Apple’s Weather app tries to do too much
Ruining Dark Sky’s hyperlocal weather notifications wasn’t Apple’s only crime. The Dark Sky app was nice to look at, with the most important information on the main screen: temperature, an icon for current weather conditions, a graph showing the upcoming rain forecast, and a timeline of conditions for the next 24 hours. It’s truly everything I ever wanted to know, all on one screen.
Apple’s Weather app, by comparison, displays a lot more information, while somehow managing to completely omit the information I actually want: whether or not it’s going to rain in the next few hours. The Weather app’s main screen shows an icon for each hour representing weather conditions, and while these show rain clouds, the icons don’t always give the complete picture.
For example, according to the icons above, there will be no rain between 12 p.m. and 1 p.m. However, looking at the “chance of precipitation” chart, the chance of rain jumps up to 70% almost immediately after 12 p.m. The icon says it won’t rain, but the forecast says it probably will.
The Weather app has details on everything from air pollution to UV index, but I just want to know if it’s going to rain or not. Is this too much to ask?
Big Tech Acquisitions Are Often Bad for Consumers
Unfortunately, this is a common trend in acquisitions. A small business stands out by doing something better than others. A large company sees that a small company is doing well and decides it wants a piece of the pie. The big company then continues to ruin everything that was good about the original service, while simultaneously removing access to the good version of that service.
Remember Skype? It was the dominant leader in the VoIP market until it was acquired by Microsoft in 2011, and began its inevitable decline, with feature overload and a terrible user interface overhaul. Skype was officially retired in 2025. Microsoft was also at fault again when it acquired the popular Sunrise Calendar app, integrated it into Outlook, and shut down the original app.
These types of acquisitions rarely seem to end well for consumers. Even if, by some miracle, a big company somehow improves or simply doesn’t destroy the functionality of an app it acquired, shutting down the original app means fewer choices for users. It also removes any competition that might force the larger company to spend time and effort improving its applications.
Apps come and apps go, but there are some you’ll never forget. Dark Sky was so good at what it did, and Apple somehow managed to completely remove all the parts that made it so good. Unfortunately, it was too easy to predict.
