The creator of Dark Sky, who sold his popular weather app to Apple in March 2020, is back with a new take on weather forecasting. The team recently announced the release of a new app, Acme Weather. The app claims to provide better and more reliable forecasts than the one I was using with Dark Sky. The app also offers a variety of unique weather notifications, including fun notifications like alerts about rainbows and beautiful sunsets.
Unlike typical weather apps, Acme Weather’s forecasts are supplemented with a variety of alternative forecasts to improve accuracy.
Dark Sky co-founder Adam Grossman explains in an introductory blog post that the app’s unique weather forecasts leverage a variety of numerical weather models, satellite data, ground station observations, and radar data, making the forecasts highly reliable.
However, the app also displays additional prediction lines that indicate other possible outcomes as gray lines on the graph.
“Forecasts are often wrong. Weather, right? Weather is one of the most difficult things to predict,” Grossman told TechCrunch in a phone interview. “And the biggest complaint about many weather apps is that they only give you their best guess and you don’t know how certain it is.”
He noted that understanding the alternatives can help people plan for big events.
“I think this will be most useful for winter storms. They start in the morning and might bring snow, but they could also linger a little later and continue into the afternoon, in which case it would be rain,” Gross explained. “You can see that right there on the timeline, so you can intuitively know if all the models are matching and it’s snowing, or if it’s half snow and half rain,” he says.
This type of weather data can be a valuable product for consumers as well as other developers.
With Dark Sky, the team provided developers with a weather API for a fee. After being acquired by Apple, the team went to work creating WeatherKit, a developer toolkit that provides subscription-based access to Apple’s weather data. Grossman said the team has not yet determined whether the developer API will be part of Acme Weather’s services.
Instead, Acme Weather is a consumer app that costs $25 a year and comes with a two-week free trial. This helps cover the potentially expensive costs associated with deploying various weather models and resources.
“Most of our time has been spent building our own forecasts, our own data providers. This allows us to do things like build multiple forecasts… [and] “Rather than relying on third-party map providers, we have the freedom to create the maps we want,” Grossman said.
When you launch the app, it provides a variety of maps including radar, lightning, rain, snow totals, wind, temperature, humidity, cloud cover, and hurricane path.
Another feature, Community Reports, allows users to share information about current conditions to improve the app’s real-time weather forecast.
Dark Sky has become a popular weather app thanks to its incredible ability to predict when it’s going to start raining where you are, but Acme Weather aims to improve on that and make it even more fun.
The app incorporates common notifications such as rain, nearby lightning, community reports, and government-issued severe weather warnings. The company also plans to experiment with alerts such as rainbow predictions and times when beautiful sunsets are likely to be seen.
These will be available in a special “Acme Labs” section of the app, and Grossman said the predictions will be conservative given the difficulty level.
Users can also customize notifications to focus on weather phenomena they care about, such as wind, UV index, and chance of rain over the next 24 hours.
Being able to try new ideas is part of what drew the team back to developing indie apps, Grossman said.
“I really love Apple…but as a big company, it’s hard to try out 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 this idea of being able to try different things is interesting.”
Acme Weather is currently available on iOS. An Android version is also planned.
The team is self-run and includes co-founders Josh Reyes and Dan Abrutyn, who also worked at Dark Sky. The small number of employees includes both former Dark Sky team members and new employees.
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