The creators of Dark Sky, who sold the popular weather app to Apple in March 2020, are back with a new approach to weather forecasting. The team recently announced the launch of their new app, Acme Weatherwho claim it offers a better and more reliable forecast than what they had in Dark Sky. The app will also offer a number of unique weather alerts, including fun ones like alerts for rainbows and beautiful sunsets.
Unlike standard weather apps, Acme’s weather forecast is supplemented with a number of alternative forecasts for better accuracy.
Dark Sky co-founder Adam Grossman explains in an introduction blog post which the application’s domestic forecasts will utilize different numerical weather forecasting models, satellite data, ground station observations and radar data, making its forecast quite reliable.
However, the app will also feature additional prediction lines that show the other possible outcomes as gray lines on its graphs.
“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’re taking their best guess and not knowing how sure they are.”
Understanding the alternatives helps people plan big events, he noted.
“I find it most useful for winter storms, where maybe the storm starts in the morning and it’s going to snow, but maybe there’s also a chance it’s going to last a little bit later — into the afternoon — so it’s rain,” Gross explained. “Being able to see it right there on the timeline gives you that gut feeling of are all the models in agreement and are you getting snow? Or are half of them saying snow and half of them saying rain?” he says.
This type of weather data could create a valuable product, not only for consumers, but also for other developers.
At Dark Sky, the team had offered the weather API to developers for a fee. After being acquired by Apple, the team worked to create WeatherKitthe developer toolkit that provides access to Apple’s weather data with a subscription. Grossman said the team has not yet decided whether a developer API will be part of Acme Weather’s offering.
By contrast, Acme Weather is a $25-per-year consumer app with a two-week free trial. This helps cover the cost of pulling it different weather models and resourceswhich can be expensive.
“Most of our time has been spent building our own forecast — our own data provider, in a sense. And that allows us to do things like build multiple forecasts … [and] create whatever map we want, rather than relying on a third-party map provider,” noted Grossman.
At launch, the app offers a range of maps including radar, lightning, rain and snow ensembles, 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 had become a favorite weather app due to its incredible ability to predict when it will start raining in your location, Acme Weather aims to improve on that and even have fun.
The app includes built-in alerts for standard things like rain, nearby lightning, community reports, government-issued severe weather alerts, and more. It will also experiment with notifications like rainbow predictions or when you might see a beautiful sunset.
These will be available in a special “Acme Labs” section of the app, and Grossman said they’ll be conservative with their predictions given the difficulty.
Users will also be able to customize their alerts to focus on weather events they care about, such as wind or UV index, or the chance of rain in the next 24 hours.
Being able to try new ideas is part of what drew the team back to building an indie app, Grossman noted.
“I absolutely love Apple … but as a big company, it’s hard to try weird, new, experimental ideals. If you have a billion users, mistakes are costly,” he tells TechCrunch. “There are big software development cycles, there’s a lot of stakeholders, this idea of being able to try a bunch of things, I think is interesting.”
Acme Weather is currently available on iOS. An Android version is planned.
The team is bootstrapped and includes co-founders Josh Reyes and Dan Abrutinalso formerly of Dark Sky. The small workforce includes both former Dark Sky team members and new hires.
