A former Apple team launches Acme Weather, a new approach to weather forecasting

The creators of Dark Sky, who sold their popular weather app to Apple in March 2020, are back with a new take on weather forecasting. The team recently announced the launch of their new app Acme Weather, which they claim offers better and more reliable forecasts than the app they introduced in Dark Sky. The app will also offer a range of unique weather notifications, including fun ones like alerts about rainbows and beautiful sunsets.

Unlike typical weather apps, Acme Weather forecasts are supplemented with a set of alternative forecasts for better accuracy.

Dark Sky co-founder Adam Grossman explains in an introductory blog post that the app’s local forecasts will leverage various numerical weather prediction models, satellite data, ground station observations, and radar data, making its forecasts fairly reliable.

However, the app will also have additional forecast lines that display 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. “The biggest pet peeve with a lot of weather apps is that you get your best guesses, and you don’t know how certain they are.”

He noted that understanding alternatives helps people plan big events.

“I find it very useful for winter storms, where maybe the storm starts in the morning, and it’s going to snow, but maybe there’s also the possibility that it will stick around a little later — into the afternoon — in which case it will rain,” Gross explained. “Being able to see that right on the timeline gives you that intuitive sense of, ‘Are all the models agreeing, is it snowing? Or are half of them saying snow and half of them saying rain?'” he says.

This type of weather data could provide a valuable product not only for consumers, but for other developers as well.

At Dark Sky, the team offered its weather API to developers for a fee. After it was acquired by Apple, the team worked to create WeatherKit, a developer toolkit that provides access to Apple’s weather data on a subscription basis. Grossman said the team has not yet decided whether the developer API will be part of the Acme Weather offering.

Instead, Acme Weather is a $25 per year consumer app, with a free two-week trial. This helps cover the costs associated with using different weather models and resources, which can be expensive.

“We’ve spent most of our time building our own forecasts — our own data provider, in a way. This allows us to do things like build multiple forecasts…[and] “Create any map we want, instead of having to rely on a third-party map provider,” Grossman noted.

At launch, the app offers a range of maps, such as radar, lightning, rain and snow totals, as well as wind, temperature, humidity, cloud cover and tornado tracks.

Another feature, Community Reports, allows users to share information about their current conditions to improve the app’s real-time weather reporting.

While Dark Sky has become a favorite weather app due to its uncanny ability to predict when it will start raining in your location, Acme Weather aims to improve on this and even have some fun.

The app includes built-in notifications for the usual things, like nearby rain and lightning, community reports, government-issued severe weather alerts, and more. You’ll also try out alerts like rainbow forecasts or ones that pinpoint when you might see a beautiful sunset.

These will be available in the “Acme Labs” section of the app, and Grossman said they will be conservative in their predictions, given the difficulty.

Users will also be able to customize their notifications to focus on weather events of interest to them, such as wind, UV index, or the probability of precipitation in the next 24 hours.

Grossman noted that the ability to try new ideas is part of what brought the team back to creating a standalone app.

“I absolutely love Apple… but as a big company, it’s hard to try out weird, new experimental ideals,” he tells TechCrunch. “If you have a billion users, mistakes are going to be expensive.” “There are long software development cycles, there are a lot of stakeholders, and I think the idea of ​​being able to try a bunch of things is interesting.”

Acme Weather is currently available on iOS. An Android version is planned.

The team has been bootstrapped and includes co-founders Josh Reyes and Dan Abrutyn, who were also previously at Dark Sky. The small workforce includes both former Dark Sky team members and new employees.