Dark Sky is dead. The iOS weather app that, according to Russell Jacobs at Slate, “forever changed the way we get our forecasts,” has ceased to function after being bought by Apple. I will miss it, but so it goes.
I agree with much of what Jacobs writes in his little farewell to Dark Sky — it really did seem fresh and new and revolutionary when I discovered it so many years ago, and I became a complete devotee, relying on it ever since for my daily and minute-to-minute weather updates, even when it was clearly wrong so much of the time.
Apple bought Dark Sky and now claims you can still get Dark Sky functionality in Apple Weather, but
Back in September, Daring Fireball linked to ForecastAdvisor, which will show you a comparison of the forecasts for your location from many major weather services and tell you which has been the most accurate for your location for the last month and the last year. That’s what convinced me to switch to the Weather Underground as my weather source — for the locations I care about it is always either the most accurate or the second most accurate, trading places with the Weather Channel depending on the location or time period. I have never been a fan of the Weather Channel’s information presentation, and while the Weather Underground isn’t perfect, I’ve learned how to find the information I care about the most fairly quickly and easily.
That said, the weather app I probalby use the most is Carrot Weather, primarily because it has a great presentation on Apple Watch, which is what I probably consult the most for weather updates. It used to rely on Dark Sky for its forecasts, which was maybe one of its selling points early on, but now you can choose different sources, including Accuweather, which seems generally about 80-83% reliable (compared to the 82-88% reliability of Weather Underground over the last month/year). Carrot also has character and offers great lock screen widgets for iPhone, so… Is it worth $20/year? Probably not.