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 Acme Weather app, which they claim offers a better and more reliable forecast than what they had on Dark Sky. The app will also offer a variety of unique weather alerts, including fun ones like rainbow alerts and beautiful sunsets.
Unlike typical weather apps, Acme Weather Forecast is supplemented with a number of alternative forecasts for better accuracy.
In an introductory blog post, Dark Sky co-founder Adam Grossman explains that the app’s home forecasts will use a variety of numerical weather forecast models, satellite data, ground station observations and radar data, making its forecast fairly reliable.
However, the app will also include additional forecast lines that show other possible outcomes as gray lines on its charts.
“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 our biggest pet peeve with a lot of weather apps is that you just get their best guess and you don’t know how sure they are.”
Understanding the alternatives helps people plan for big events, he noted.
“I find it most useful for winter storms, where maybe the storm starts in the morning and you get snow, but maybe there’s a chance it’s going to last a little bit later — into the afternoon — in which case there’s rain,” Gross explained. “Seeing it right on the timeline gives you an intuitive sense of whether all the models agree and is it snowing? Or are half of them saying snow and half saying rain?” he says.
This type of weather data could be a valuable product not only for consumers but also for other developers.
At Dark Sky, the team offered its weather API to developers for a fee. After being acquired by Apple, the team worked to create WeatherKit, a developer toolkit that provides subscription-based access to Apple’s weather data. Grossman said the team has not yet decided whether the developer API will be part of the Acme Weather offering.
Instead, Acme Weather is a $25-a-year consumer app with a two-week free trial. This helps cover the costs of pulling in different weather models and resources, which can be expensive.
“We’ve spent most of our time creating our own forecast — our own data provider, in a way. And that allows us to do things like create multiple forecasts … (and) create any map we want instead of having to rely on a third-party map provider,” Grossman noted.
When you launch the app, it offers a variety of maps such as radar, lightning, rain and snow totals, as well as wind, temperature, humidity, cloud cover and hurricane tracks.
Another feature, Community Reports, allows users to share information about their current conditions to improve the app’s real-time weather reports.
While Dark Sky has become a popular weather app for its uncanny ability to predict when it will start raining in your location, Acme Weather aims to improve on that and even have fun with it.
The app has built-in alerts for typical things like rain, nearby government lightning, community news, severe weather alerts, and more. It will also experiment with alerts such as rainbow predictions or those that determine when you might see a beautiful sunset.
These will be available in a special section of the “Acme Labs” app, and Grossman said that given the difficulty, they will be conservative in their predictions.
Users will also be able to customize their notifications to focus on weather events that interest them, such as wind or UV index or the chance of rain over the next 24 hours.
The ability to try new ideas is part of what drew the team back to building an independent app, Grossman noted.
“I absolutely love Apple… but as a big company it’s hard to try weird, new, experimental ideals. When you have a billion users, mistakes are expensive,” he tells TechCrunch. “There are long software development cycles, there are many stakeholders, this idea of being able to try a lot of things is interesting to me.”
Acme Weather is currently available for iOS. An Android version is planned.
The team is bootstrapped and includes co-founders Josh Reyes and Dan Abrutyn, also formerly of Dark Sky. The small workforce includes both former Dark Sky team members and new hires.