This is a shame. They are radically better weather experiences than any you've seen before. Go check them out now.
I don't find them an improvement for medium-term or longer-term forecasting, and I continue to use other sources for these cases.
Good luck Dark Sky, keep improving :)
No problem with that; nice interface. This site compares various "weather providers" and compares how they did: http://forecastadvisor.com/
"Past Performance is Not Necessarily Indicative of Future Results"
Longer-term forecasts and temperatures are incidental.
My user style https://userstyles.org/styles/104812/forecast-io-hide-map hides the map, which looks cool but is totally useless. That brings the detailed daily forecasts above the fold.
My user script https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/4699-forecast-io-auto-show... expands the detailed forecast for today when you visit the website, without you having to click it. I use the detailed forecast often, to check if the weather would be significantly different if I delayed my outing.
1. It defaults to my ISP's location 400 miles away in London, which is understandable but doesn't give me an obvious way to correct it. Can't select my city shown on the map or enter coordinates.
2. Despite guessing that I am in the UK it defaults its temperatures to Fahrenheit, which is utterly alien to Europeans.
10 mins later: still stuck on London.
Disclaimer: I visited forecast.io on my phone for the first time in years to check this. I may have missed subtleties of it not working.
I'm sold. Downloading now.
"This team of several dozen engineers, scientists, and wackos have helped farmers figure out when to fertilize and plant crops"
What was this ag project of theirs that you mention in your blog post? I can't find anything. Sounds pretty interesting.
I would think with a one time purchase each user becomes increasingly unprofitable (until they eventually reach a negative LTV) and the operation becomes untenable. Does Forecast.io monetize in ways other than the Dark Sky app? (I admit only being vaguely aware of them as a non iPhone user)
(And to answer your other question: Forecast.io makes some money, but not much. And we do have an increasingly large revenue stream in our data API)
The "Are they going to fuck things up?" section at the bottom of their post certainly sheds some light on why the reliability has dropped off of late.
For whatever reason where I live in Brooklyn is completely unreliable. If the problem is scaling, I guess it would makes sense that they're choking on the volume of users in the NYC region
Glad to see that instead of selling to the weather channel or something they're continuing to put engineering muscle behind it. Dark Sky & Forecast.io are just awesome and I really want to see these guys succeed.
At this point I've given up. I use Forecast.io because it's a well-made app (except for no iPhone 6 update, very sad), but I completely ignore the forecast for the next hour. It's basically never correct, predicting rain far more than it ever happens and often telling me that it's raining when it's not.
The developers are an indie app store success story as well. Started the project on Kickstarter with a new way to present hyper-local weather data down to the minute, in an industry dominated by a few big players and conventional hourly forecasts based on region. Based somewhere in upstate NY if I recall too
A couple examples: - a surprising percentage of people that have signed up so far are photographers that want to be alerted to ideal forecast conditions for several locations. - My wife is a hydro-geologist, so a lot of her sampling needs to be done after specific weather conditions. Her sample locations are spread all over a large region and it's a real pain for her to check weather conditions for so many locations daily.
Thanks for checking out the site.
Adam, Jay, thanks a lot for the quick support and the high quality API. You guys are doing awesome work! Keep it up.
It would be useful to have some insight into the underlying data, it's freshness, and an easy way to report inaccuracy (I've sent support emails but they've gone unanswered -- I assume the support load is enormous for a small team).
Please keep the API up and running! And congratulations!
Three things I’d like to comment on after reading the post:
1. The post title confuses me: Looking at the content of the post, I understand that Dark Sky has a new co-owner rather than a new owner.
2. I enjoyed the openness and directness of the last paragraph.
3. I did not enjoy the language at a couple of places. :-)
Congratulations and best wishes for the future of the company, its services and its apps!
Hopefully with more devs and support, an Android version of the app will be in the works!
Yes, I needed all caps there because I'm shouting.
And in case you're not aware their hourly feed has kick ass data that is amazingly accurate.
