Dark Sky

» see darksky.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

dark sky was an ios weather app made by a two-person team. adam grossman and jay laporta launched a kickstarter for it on october 26 2011 and shipped the app in april 2012. the differentiator was hyperlocal precipitation forecasting. you opened the app and it told you that it would start raining in about eleven minutes and stop forty minutes later. it was right often enough that people started checking it before leaving the house.

the app cost three dollars and ninety-nine cents up front, no subscription. the api behind it was where the company actually made money. forecast.io was the developer-facing brand. by the mid 2010s, dark sky's weather data was powering carrot weather and a long tail of third-party clients that licensed the api. the company stayed small. there was no growth team and no engagement loop.

apple acquired dark sky on march 31 2020. the android version was killed on august 1 2020 with full refunds. the ios app and api kept running for a transition window. weatherkit launched at wwdc 2022 as the apple-branded api successor. dark sky for ios shut on january 1 2023. the precipitation prediction lives on inside the apple weather app, slightly rewritten for the wider apple user base.

i missed dark sky on first round. i was on android in 2014 and 2015 when it was peak ios cult product. the android version arrived in may 2016 and i tried it then. it worked. by the time i switched to iphone four years later it had already been acquired and was running on borrowed time. i never bought the paid version. apple weather inherited the rain-minute graph and i use that now without thinking about where it came from.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it actually did ~

the forecast model was the part nobody else did well in 2012. dark sky downloaded high-resolution radar maps from noaa and ran short-term extrapolation against your exact gps coordinates. the prediction window was about an hour out. inside that window it usually beat the apple system weather app on simple precipitation calls. for anything longer than a day it used the same nws and ecmwf data everyone else used.

~ the apple absorption ~

apple has been doing this since the workflow acquisition in 2017. the pattern is consistent. apple buys a small studio with a sharp product. the standalone app gets a long shutdown window. the feature reappears inside the os version. sparrow went into mail this way and sunrise went into outlook. workflow became shortcuts. dark sky became most of apple weather in ios 15.

the api was the harder loss. wwdc 2022 launched weatherkit as the apple-branded replacement with apple developer pricing, and the standalone forecast.io api had a hard cutoff on march 31 2023. a lot of small weather apps had to pick a successor or move to a competitor like open-meteo. carrot weather kept working by integrating multiple providers.

~ what remains ~

adam grossman left apple in 2025 and announced acme weather in february 2026 with a new app and forecast stack of his own. the rain-minute graph is everywhere now. every third-party weather app has its own version. dark sky was never the inventor of nowcasting, but it was the first consumer product that put short-term precipitation prediction on a phone home screen and made people trust it.

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