{"id":498098,"date":"2026-02-25T07:46:10","date_gmt":"2026-02-25T07:46:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/498098\/"},"modified":"2026-02-25T07:46:10","modified_gmt":"2026-02-25T07:46:10","slug":"the-team-behind-dark-sky-launches-a-weather-app-for-uncertain-low-trust-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/498098\/","title":{"rendered":"The team behind Dark Sky launches a weather app for uncertain, low-trust times"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

This seems fitting for a time when a lot of Americans aren\u2019t sure what to trust and say it\u2019s important to do their own research<\/a>: A weather app from the folks behind the beloved app Dark Sky<\/a> (sold to Apple in 2022<\/a>) that embraces uncertainty.<\/p>\n

The app is called Acme Weather<\/a>. From their blog post<\/a>: <\/p>\n

Our biggest pet peeve with most weather apps is how they deal (or rather, don\u2019t deal) with forecast uncertainty. It is a simple fact that no weather forecast will ever be 100% reliable: the weather is moody, fickle, and chaotic. Forecasts are often wrong.<\/p>\n

Understanding this uncertainty is crucial for planning your day. Most weather apps will give you their single best guess, leaving you to wonder how sure they actually are, and what else might happen instead. Will it actually start raining at 9am, or might it end up pushed off until noon? Will there be rain or snow? How sure are you? You can\u2019t plan your day if you don\u2019t know how much you can trust the forecast, or know what other possibilities might arise. Rather than pretending we will always be right, Acme Weather embraces the idea that our forecast will sometimes be wrong.<\/p>\n

The app \u201c[supplements] the main forecast with a spread of alternate predictions. These are additional forecast lines that capture a range of alternate possible outcomes.\u201d<\/p>\n

(Some of this messaging echoes The New York Times\u2019 recent interview with its weather team<\/a>: \u201cMembers of the New York Times Weather team like to emphasize what they don\u2019t know. That\u2019s a defining feature of the team\u2019s approach to extreme weather coverage. They capture the uncertainty in a forecast through explanations and visualizations of weather data, preparing readers for a range of possible outcomes rather than leaning into hard predictions.\u201d)<\/p>\n

Acme Weather is $25 a year and on iOS<\/a> for now, with an Android version planned. \u201cMost of our time has been spent on building our own forecast \u2014 our own data provider, in a way,\u201d Adam Grossman, the cofounder of Dark Sky, told TechCrunch<\/a>. \u201cAnd this lets us do things like build multiple forecasts\u2026[and] create any map we want, rather than having to rely on a third-party map provider.\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s also a community reports feature. \u201cThere\u2019s nothing more reliable than when a person nearby tells you what\u2019s happening,\u201d Grossman notes in the blog post, \u201cso if there are recent reports near you we\u2019ll flag it in the app.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some of this language, by<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This seems fitting for a time when a lot of Americans aren\u2019t sure what to trust and say…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":498099,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[49,48,190,61],"class_list":{"0":"post-498098","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mobile","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-mobile","11":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/498098","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=498098"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/498098\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/498099"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=498098"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=498098"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=498098"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}