After selling their popular weather app to Apple in March 2020, where some of its core features were incorporated into Apple Weather, the creators of Dark Sky have left Apple to create yet another alternative. Their new app, called Acme Weather, embraces the fact that forecasts will never be entirely accurate by providing both a main prediction of the day’s conditions and several alternate predictions.
Acme Weather is currently only available for iOS. An Android version is planned, but there’s no release timeline yet. You can try it out for two weeks for free, but a $25 annual subscription is needed if you like what you see and want to keep using it. Dark Sky cost $3.99 when it was a third-party app, but Acme Weather’s creators claim their new app will provide better forecasts and more weather info than Dark Sky did, sourced from satellite data, ground station observations, and radar data.
The alternate predictions will be presented alongside the primary forecast as a series of lines showing how conditions may progress throughout the day. When the alternate prediction lines are grouped close together, it’s an indication that the primary forecast is reliable. When there’s a wider spread between predictions, the forecast could be more likely to change throughout the day.
To expand the information available through the app during active weather events, Acme Weather also allows users to report conditions where they’re located, which appear on a map as simple icons. Community-reported conditions are joined by other maps featuring radar, lightning, rain and snow amounts, wind, temperature, humidity, storm tracks, and cloud cover, which are included with forecasts based on their relevancy to predicted conditions.
Dark Sky was known for its excellent notifications, which are another feature being carried forward with Acme Weather. The new app will offer user-customizable notifications that can include “down-to-the-minute rain warnings,” government-issued severe weather warnings, nearby lightning activity, and even a heads-up as to when you might be able to see a rainbow at your location.
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