9 ms·
Ask HN: DarkSky Alternatives?
What for desktop and/or mobile are yall using to replace Dark Sky?
- paulcole 4y agoApple Weather (iOS, iPadOS, MacOS) is excellent.
- geuis 4y agoYeah, its excellent because Apple bought Darksky and shut down the app/website after integrating their tech and staff.
- relyks 4y agoI miss being able to use the web interface though
- GiorgioG 4y agoNo it still sucks compared to Dark Sky
- bfrog 4y agoApple weather is about as useful as one of those plastic bubble popping lawnmowers. As in darn near useless. They hid the hourly reports a few levels into the app and the darn thing never is right for me. Makes me really hate apple a little bit more every time I use it. “Sunny and clear” no apple, it’s snowing.
- troydavis 4y agoHere’s a few suggestions from a similar question a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34269795 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34269795
- hayespotter 4y agocarrot, especially if you like to really customize your things. I personally really like that I can define specific weather stations in my area. I also have some friends who really like “Hello Weather”.
- 2c2c2c 4y agoSeems like the apple weather app is updated? seems to 'just work' at this point :-)
- WirelessGigabit 4y agoNo. I live in an unincorporated town. Dark Sky vs Apple was 3 degree difference as Apple reverted to the town 'next door'. But we actually have different weather. Slightly cooler. And rain hits us later.
- TechBro8615 4y agoIsn't Apple Weather using the Dark Sky data/API now? I thought that's why they shut down Dark Sky - because the Weather app incorporated everything in it.
- WirelessGigabit 4y agoYou'd think, but this clearly didn't happen, as shown by the complaints online...
- creade 4y agohttps://merrysky.net/ https://merrysky.net/ is the closest I've found yet to the Dark Sky mobile web ux
- wferrell 4y agoWow. Thanks for posting this
- medell 4y agoThis is impressively very close! It uses Pirate Weather, a thread on accuracy from last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34198683 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34198683
- eps 4y agoSeems to be way off the mark, at least here in Europe.
- duanem 4y agoI'm in the process of porting Flowx, an Android weather app, to iOS. It is currently released for beta testing. I've added most global and European data and am planning to add NOAA's NAM and HRRR data in the next week or two. I still have to add waves, radar and wind streamlines. If you're interested in testing, email me or contact me via the flowx forum.
- toss1 4y agoReaders should note that this is a fantastic app, a tour-de-force in useful visualization of quantitative data — live weather models in great detail — and one of the apps that would keeps me firmly in the Android world (although evidently now being ported to Apple). No relationship other than satisfied (and impressed ) customer for many years. You've gotta try this!
- pseufaux 4y agoIf you don’t mind a subscription, Carrot is an excellent app.
- sashk 4y agoCarrot Weather: https://www.meetcarrot.com/weather/ https://www.meetcarrot.com/weather/
- bobbylarrybobby 4y agoTo expand on this: Carrot weather is a somewhat silly weather app. It is serious in that it aims to provide a very solid outlook on the weather with a highly customizable UI -- in fact you can even recreate the dark sky app’s UI if you'd like. However it is silly in that it comes with an “AI” “assistant” who spawns challenges and achievements. I don't mind much but it can be a bit distracting in a weather app for the assistant to talk about our relationship.
- trillic 4y agowindy.com
- qwertyuiop_ 4y agoVentusky
- dieselgate 4y agoVentusky is good and you can pan/expand the map unlike merrysky
- clnq 4y agoI always wondered why DarkSky was so popular. Was it the design? It was known to be generally inaccurate among meteorologists, while other apps (METAR+TAF especially) would be remarkably accurate. I don't intend this to be a jab at anyone's app preferences, but I'm very interested in the value proposition that hooked people.
- drfuzzyness 4y agoIn rainy parts of the US such as the Pacific North West coast, having a thirty minute warning that it's about to rain is really handy. It can make the difference between biking home sopping wet or squeezing in between two downbursts of rain. The rest of the app was fine, but not great. It demanded constant attention as its "predictions" changed constantly.
- adrinux 4y agoThis! It was that combination of rain radar and really obvious app specific audio alarms that no other weather app seems to understand. I live in Scotland, a famously rainy country. We line dry our laundry outside and dark sky alerted me take it indoors before rain for years. Then Apple took it away and my laundry regularly gets rained on. The closest I've found for this functionality on Android is Rain Alarm. It has two flaws though. One is that it uses public rain radar data that only updates every 15 mins, so often you get an alert when its already started raining. The second is that it uses a circular search path, so you get false positive rain alerts that it's raining 3km away when that rain shower is actually passing by and will not hit us. For these features Dark Sky was unique and accurate enough.
- walthamstow 4y agoI've had decent luck with the Met Office app for Android The weather is only at 1hr intervals but the rain radar maps are at 15min and you get the last 6 hours and the next 24, so you can see where patches of rain are coming from and where they're going to be at which time
- voidfunc 4y ago
- wrycoder 4y agoMyRadar.
- Apreche 4y agohttps://www.weather.gov/ https://www.weather.gov/ NOAA is where most of the other US-based weather services are getting their data from anyway. Why go to a secondary source when the primary source is free?
- kmlx 4y agothat’s just for one country…
- colanderman 4y agoDarkSky was one of the few exceptions here. My understanding is they performed their own modeling and forecasting.
- SamuelAdams 4y agoThat looks terrible on a mobile device.
- ck2 4y agoChange the lat/lon on this to yours but if their station isn't nearby accuracy wanes fast. https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?FcstType=graphical&textField1=40.7306&textField2=-73.935 https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?FcstType=graphical... I've become a fan of personal weather stations but of course if you are traveling that doesn't work (unless a startup wants to put a weather station into a phone/watch somehow)
- somenewaccount1 4y agoRadarnow has been my go to satellite weather app for many years now. Idk if it's the best because I haven't tried the others, but I like it and found it very accurate when living in Oregon. It was neet to time projects between the rain drops, literally.
- jnthn 4y agohttps://www.rainviewer.com/ https://www.rainviewer.com/ Has been mostly good, where DarkSky never really worked in Europe.
- Terretta 4y agoStrange comment. As it was originally mostly ECMWF and a few other EU centric models that supported near term precip better than US models, it seemed better in EU to me. It got worse after it took off in US though, I'd agree. Meanwhile climacell worked better in US. Consider checking out windy.app to compare models easily for one or a mix of several that work best where you are: https://windy.app/support/windy-app-weather-forecast-models.html https://windy.app/support/windy-app-weather-forecast-models.... I'd moved from DarkSky to this years back, thanks to frequent travel to weird weather areas where I needed locally accurate microclimate handling.
- jnthn 4y agoWindy is great as well and I have been using that as well for forecasting, but one thing that’s missing compared to the Rainviewer/DarkSky seems to be the “real time” alerts. Thats what I believe DarkSky never supported outside US/UK - doppler radar or whatnot based notifications that seemed to be its main selling point. Apple Weather doesn’t support next hour precipitation notifications either outside UK/Ireland and US: > Next-hour precipitation forecasts and precipitation notifications are available for Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
- petodo 4y agoTIL Climacell rebranded to Tomorrow.io https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=co.climacell.climacell https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=co.climacell.c... https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id1443325509 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id1443325509 edit: what a horrible app, can't delete unwanted cards from Feed and 14 days forecast show tempratures only for tomorrow with no data shown for other days plus let's ignore the fact it's iOS design just ported on Android
- petodo 4y agoAre you asking about API or just about weather data source for forecast? I was comparing many data sources over many weeks and my results in Prague were Aeris weather most accurate (least false positives/negatives for rain), then gap and Foreca and MET Norway same and then big gap and you have very bad sources like Dark Sky, AccuWeather, Weatherbit and Open weather which are unusable. As for the mobile apps on Android I use Weawow (has all 3 most accurate sources) and Today Weather (no Aeris, but had Foreca and MET Norway). I'd recommend these two apps and comparing sources for few weeks to find out which one is the most accurate for your location, because accuracy varies across different locations, so there won't be single correct universal answer what you should use.
- kyoob 4y agoI use Weather Strip, which has a unique and slick interface for the upcoming week’s forecast. I’ve never seen another weather app quite like it.
- bobbylarrybobby 4y agoWow, this may be the one of the best designed weather apps I've ever used. I can see so much at once and don't need to think to process what I'm seeing.
- morbicer 4y agoFor Europe: https://www.windy.com/ https://www.windy.com/
- toss1 4y agoI used to use DarkSky on Android I've since put together a kit of much better alternatives: Foreca [0] is most similar with at-a-glance daily or hourly (with drill-down) weather calendar display. FlowX [1] is an amazing current visualization of any of numerous weather models in great detail as well as graphs of key values, hi-low, etc.. The visualization is spectacular and just swiping advances/reverses the point in time, so you can really see the motion of the weather systems, and show any of a dozen or so parameters (everything from temp. precip rate, clouds, wind speed, humidity, gasses, etc.). It is a spectacular tour-de-force of usabele visualization of quantitative data — I can't speak highly enough about it, and on the few times I've contacted the developer I found him friendly, knowledgeable, and helpful. Rainy Days Radar [2] is a good visualization of current radar data. Very helpful in seeing the motion of current nearby precipitation and timing it's arrival. All are very easy to switch to a different city/locale if you need info for somewhere else. I've got no relationship with any of these other than being a satisfied customer. [0] www.foreca.com [1] https://www.flowx.io/ https://www.flowx.io/ [2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.neenbedankt.rainydays&gl=US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.neenbedank...
- headsupernova 4y agoSo glad to see the FlowX mention. I've been obsessed with that app since back when it was called WeatherBomb. The premium data is well worth the cost imo, and the customizable widgets are so useful once you dial them in for what you're interested in!
- commoner 4y agoGeometric Weather (for Android) is free, open source, and nicely designed. Data sources include AccuWeather (default), OpenWeatherMap, Météo-France, and Caiyun (China). - F-Droid: https://f-droid.org/packages/wangdaye.com.geometricweather/ https://f-droid.org/packages/wangdaye.com.geometricweather/ - Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=wangdaye.com.geometricweather https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=wangdaye.com.g... - Source: https://github.com/WangDaYeeeeee/GeometricWeather https://github.com/WangDaYeeeeee/GeometricWeather A beta version of Geometric Weather is available for testing on iOS: https://github.com/WangDaYeeeeee/GeometricWeather-iOS https://github.com/WangDaYeeeeee/GeometricWeather-iOS
- meteo-jeff 4y agoI am working on an open source weather api: https://open-meteo.com https://open-meteo.com If you are looking for raw weather forecast data, it could be a good start
- tomaskafka 4y agoHi HN, I'm making an indie, privacy-focused visual forecast app for iOS and Apple Watch, and have added a Dark Sky-style view a few days ago. Here's the link: https://weathergraph.app https://weathergraph.app Screenshots: https://impresskit.net/6430c7f0-b34b-418f-9824-f386f939be9a/images https://impresskit.net/6430c7f0-b34b-418f-9824-f386f939be9a/... Compared to Apple Weather, it uses more weather sources (and often better - Foreca often ranks in top 3 at https://forecastadvisor.com https://forecastadvisor.com and has 3-hour nowcast on par with Dark Sky), shows more forecast metrics (like wind speed & direction, humidity & dew point, UV index, etc.) and you can pick a color theme and metrics to display. The app provides quite nice home screen and lock screen widgets for iOS, and many people say it’s the best weather complication for Apple Watch. I am outdoor runner and biker, and as I built the app for myself, I made sure that the watch (and phone) app doesn’t go blank when it loses the connection or when you go running/biking without an LTE watch. Instead, it caches the last known forecast for up to 24 hours, as that's when the hourly forecast is still reasonably reliable, and shows ‘what would the weather according to the last forecast be right now’. Weathergraph is also privacy focused (no ads or tracking), as that is how I want all apps on my phone/watch to behave. The basic app with Dark Sky view and yr.no forecast is free, all the data sources and customizability can be unlocked with a subscription or a single payment. Ask me anything :).