The creators of Dark Sky, who sold their popular weather app to Apple in March 2020, are back with a new take on weather forecasting. The team recently announced the launch of their new app, Acme Weather, which they claim offers a better and more reliable forecast than the one they had at Dark Sky. The app will also offer a range of unique weather notifications, including fun ones like alerts about rainbows and beautiful sunsets.
Unlike typical weather apps, Acme Weather’s forecast is supplemented with a range of alternate predictions for better accuracy. Dark Sky co-founder Adam Grossman explains that the app’s homegrown forecasts will leverage different numerical weather prediction models, satellite data, ground station observations, and radar data, making its forecast fairly reliable. However, the app will also feature additional forecast lines that show the other possible outcomes as gray lines on its graphs.
Grossman stated that forecasts are often wrong because weather is one of the hardest things to predict. He noted that a common frustration with many weather apps is that you only get a single best guess without any sense of how certain that prediction is. Having an understanding of the alternative possibilities helps people plan for big events. He gave the example of winter storms, where seeing if models agree on snow or if half predict rain provides an intuitive sense of forecast confidence.
This type of weather data could make for a valuable product, not just for consumers, but for other developers too. At Dark Sky, the team had offered its weather API to developers for a fee. After being acquired by Apple, the team worked on creating WeatherKit, Apple’s developer toolkit for weather data. Grossman said the team hasn’t yet decided if a developer API will be a part of Acme Weather’s offering.
Instead, Acme Weather is a consumer app priced at twenty-five dollars per year, with a two-week free trial. This subscription helps to cover the costs involved with pulling in the different weather models and resources, which can be expensive. Grossman noted that most of their time has been spent building their own forecast provider, which allows them to create multiple forecasts and any map they want, rather than relying on a third-party provider.
At launch, the app offers a range of maps, like radar, lightning, rain and snow totals, as well as wind, temperature, humidity, cloud cover, and hurricane tracks. Another feature, Community Reports, lets users share information about their current conditions to improve the app’s real-time weather reporting.
While Dark Sky became a favorite for its ability to predict when rain would start, Acme Weather aims to improve on this and even have some fun. The app includes built-in notifications for typical things like rain, nearby lightning, community reports, and severe weather alerts. It will also experiment with alerts like rainbow predictions or notifications for beautiful sunsets. These will be available in a special Acme Labs section, and the team plans to be conservative with these difficult predictions.
Users can customize their notifications to focus on weather events they care about, like wind, UV index, or the possibility of rain. Grossman noted that being able to try new ideas is part of what drew the team back to building an independent app. He expressed love for Apple but explained that as a big company, it is difficult to try weird, new, experimental ideas where mistakes can be costly due to a billion users. He finds the idea of being able to try a bunch of things interesting.
Acme Weather is currently available on iOS, with an Android version planned. The team is bootstrapped and includes co-founders Josh Reyes and Dan Abrutyn, who also previously worked at Dark Sky. The small workforce includes both former Dark Sky team members and new hires.