dark skies

As a subscriber to Dark Sky, today’s announcement of Apple purchasing the hyper-local weather app draws mixed feelings at best. The concept of “hyper-local” is a powerful combination of IoT and crowd sourcing, and something that inspired hyper-local air quality experiments. Apple will no doubt fold the technology into their weather app, and that will improve a rather unimpressive native app.

But as part of the acquisition, the Dark Sky Android app will go away. More problematic is the shuttering of the Dark Sky API. No new applications for access are being taken, and it will sundown in 2022. A number of independent developers have been using the API, and researchers use the data as well. Hopefully Apple will think about opening up the data for their next-gen weather app.