The creator of Dark Sky, which sold the popular weather app to Apple in March 2020, is back with a new take on weather forecasting. The team recently announced the launch of Acme Weather, a new app that they claim provides better and more reliable forecasts than those used by Dark Sky. The app also offers a variety of unique weather alerts, including fun ones like alerts about rainbows or beautiful sunsets.
Unlike typical weather apps, Acme Weather’s forecasts are supplemented with a variety of alternative forecasts for better accuracy.
In an introductory blog post, Dark Sky co-founder Adam Grossman explains that the app’s own forecasts leverage a variety of numerical weather prediction models, satellite data, ground station observations and radar data, making the forecasts fairly reliable.
However, the app also provides additional prediction lines that show different possible outcomes as gray lines on the graph.
“Forecasts are often wrong. It’s the weather, right? It’s one of the hardest things to predict,” Grossman told TechCrunch in a phone interview. “And the most frustrating thing about using so many weather apps is that you only get your best guess and you don’t know how certain it is.”
Understanding the alternatives helps people plan large events, he said.
“I think it’s most useful for winter storms, where a storm might start in the morning and possibly bring snow, but it might also have the potential to last a little later (until the afternoon), in which case it would bring rain,” Gross explained. “If you can see it right on the timeline, all the models agree and you can intuitively know if it’s snowing, or if it’s snowing half the time and raining half the time,” he says.
This type of weather data can be a valuable product not only for consumers but also for other developers.
At Dark Sky, the team made its weather API available to developers for a fee. After being acquired by Apple, the team worked on creating WeatherKit, a developer toolkit that provides access to Apple’s weather data through subscription. Grossman said the team has not yet decided whether a developer API will be included in Acme Weather’s services.
Instead, Acme Weather is a consumer app that costs $25 per year with a two-week free trial. This helps cover the costs of bringing in different weather models and resources, which can be expensive.
“We spent most of our time building our own forecasts, our own data provider, which allows us to do things like build multiple forecasts…(and) create the maps we want without relying on third-party map providers,” Grossman said.
At launch, the app will offer a variety of maps including radar, lightning, rain and snow totals, as well as wind, temperature, humidity, cloud cover and hurricane path.
Another feature, Community Reports, allows users to improve the app’s real-time weather reporting by sharing information about current conditions.
Dark Sky has become the most popular weather app thanks to its uncanny ability to predict when it will start raining at your current location, but Acme Weather aims to improve that and add some fun.
The app has built-in notifications for common things like rain, nearby lightning, community reports, government-issued severe weather alerts, and more. We’ll also be experimenting with notifications, such as rainbow predictions or alerts that identify when you can expect to see a beautiful sunset.
These are available in a special “Acme Labs” section of the app, and Grossman said the predictions will be conservative given the difficulty.
Users can also customize notifications to focus on weather events of interest, such as wind, UV index, or the likelihood of rain in the next 24 hours.
Grossman said being able to try new ideas is one of the reasons the team went back to building indie apps.
“I really like Apple, but as a large company it’s hard to try weird, new, experimental ideals. When you have a billion users, mistakes are expensive,” he told TechCrunch. “Software development cycles are long and there are many stakeholders. I think the idea of being able to try different things is exciting.”
Acme Weather is currently available on iOS. An Android version is planned.
The team was formed by Bootstrap and also includes Josh Reyes and Dan Abrutyn, formerly co-founders of Dark Sky. The small workforce includes both former Dark Sky team members and new hires.
