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Comment by lynndotpy | Hacker News Reader

To put it gently, Apple destroyed a fantastically valuable piece of software and made my life worse. Since then, Apple has failed to come close to offering in their weather app what DarkSky offered for years prior.

Besides the API, besides the hyper-local (and, in my experience, _always_ accurate) forecasts, besides the excellent visualizations, besides the nice web app, what I miss most was the history.

I loved the history. It was perhaps DarkSky's least appreciated feature.

You could search (at least within the US) for any date in the past few decades, and find the temperature and precipitation and whatnot for a given location.

You could see what the weather was like on those important dates in your life. You could see what the weather was like the day after those important dates in your life.

It's a little bit of memory that's been excised from the commons. It still makes me sad.

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As a motorcycle rider and someone who goes top-down in my Jeep all summer, the real-time incoming rain alerts of DS were freakishly accurate and I leaned on them constantly. Apple integrated the feature and they became comically inaccurate. (The opposite of an accurate rain forecast is not great.) After getting soaked one too many times, I finally got frustrated enough to chase down the best replacement. Don't love Carrot Weather near as much, but it is the best alternative I've found for heads up on incoming precipitation. Sigh. I still remember the days of getting a "moderate rain starting in 13 minutes" alert and hoping on the bike and zipping home in time. Don't know how they did it so well.

This was almost my experience exactly. I used DarkSky as a grad student with a twenty minute bike commute and responsibilities all over a large campus. Without fail, DarkSky kept me dry. (Or, at least allowed me to avoid the worst of it.)

> Apple integrated the feature and they became comically inaccurate

Any clue why? Did broadening the pool of reporting devices from Dark Sky users to the general iPhone population somehow break their models?

It limited it-- DarkSky was on Android and iOS before Apple killed the service.

But IIRC, DarkSky stopped using phones altogether some time before Apple killed the service. I can't find a source on that given Apple also deleted DarkSky's blog, so, grain of salt.

As a fellow naked-Jeep-fan, I've been perplexed and depressed by Apple's handling of it. A couple of weeks ago, we had a thunderstorm roll through, which dropped the local temperature by ~15 degrees F, but my Apple devices kept insisting the current weather was 90º. Maddening.

Yes! The history! Why such an obviously useful feature isn't in all weather apps, I shall never know. Along with the usage you mention, I was always wanting to know at least what the temperature was yesterday so that I could work out what to wear or do today.

I'd go as far to say that the absence of past weather data in most weather apps is symbolic of the wider state of design today. Anyone with any real design knowledge, any basic capacity to synthesize argument or think about problems, would find it obvious that showing past weather is useful because it provides context. So many statistical apps (so-called "dashboards") are such drek because of this too.

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