{"id":486735,"date":"2026-02-24T02:00:11","date_gmt":"2026-02-24T02:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/486735\/"},"modified":"2026-02-24T02:00:11","modified_gmt":"2026-02-24T02:00:11","slug":"ex-apple-team-launches-acme-weather-a-new-take-on-weather-forecasting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/486735\/","title":{"rendered":"Ex-Apple team launches Acme Weather, a new take on weather forecasting"},"content":{"rendered":"

The creators of Dark Sky, who sold their popular weather app<\/a> 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<\/a>, which they claim offers a better and more reliable forecast than the one they had at Dark Sky. The app will also offer a range of unique weather notifications, including fun ones like alerts about rainbows and beautiful sunsets.<\/p>\n

Unlike typical weather apps, Acme Weather\u2019s forecast is supplemented with a range of alternate predictions for better accuracy. <\/p>\n

\"\"Image Credits:Acme Weather<\/p>\n

Dark Sky co-founder Adam Grossman explains in an introductory blog post<\/a> that the app\u2019s homegrown forecasts will leverage different<\/a> numerical weather prediction models, satellite data, ground station observations, and radar data, making its forecast fairly reliable.<\/p>\n

However, the app will also feature additional forecast lines that show the other possible outcomes as gray lines on its graphs.<\/p>\n

\"\"Image Credits:Acme Weather<\/p>\n

\u201cForecasts are often wrong \u2014 it\u2019s the weather, right? It\u2019s one of the hardest things to predict,\u201d Grossman told TechCrunch via a telephone interview. \u201cAnd our biggest pet peeve with a lot of weather apps is you just get their best guess, and you don\u2019t know how certain they are.\u201d <\/p>\n

Having an understanding of the alternatives helps people plan for big events, he noted.<\/p>\n

\u201cI find it most useful for winter storms, where, maybe the storm starts out in the morning, and you\u2019re going to get snow, but maybe there\u2019s also a possibility it holds out a little bit later \u2014 to the afternoon \u2014 in which case it\u2019s rain,\u201d Gross explained. \u201cBeing able to just see that right there on the timeline just gives you this intuitive sense of whether, do all the models agree, and you\u2019re getting snow? Or do half of them say snow and half of them say rain?\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

This type of weather data could make for a valuable product, not just for consumers, but for other developers, too. <\/p>\n

At Dark Sky, the team had offered its weather API to developers for a fee. After being acquired by Apple, the team worked on creating WeatherKit<\/a>, the developer toolkit that provides access to Apple\u2019s weather data on a subscription basis. Grossman said the team hasn\u2019t yet decided if a developer API will be a part of Acme Weather\u2019s offering.<\/p>\n

Instead, Acme Weather is a $25-per-year consumer app, with a two-week free trial. This helps to cover the costs involved with pulling in the different weather models and resources<\/a>, which can be expensive.<\/p>\n

\u201cMost of our time has been spent on building our own forecast \u2014 our own data provider, in a way. And 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 Grossman noted.<\/p>\n

At launch, the app offers a range of maps, like radar, lightning, rain and snow totals, as well as wind, temperature, humidity, cloud cover, and hurricane tracks. <\/p>\n

Another feature, Community Reports, lets users share information about their current conditions to improve the app\u2019s real-time weather reporting. <\/p>\n

\"\"Image Credits:Acme Weather<\/p>\n

While Dark Sky had become a favorite weather app because of its uncanny ability to predict when it would begin raining in your location, Acme Weather aims to improve on this and even have some fun. <\/p>\n

The app includes built-in notifications for typical things, like rain, nearby lightning, community reports, government-issued severe weather alerts, and more. It\u2019s also going to experiment with alerts like rainbow predictions or when you might see a beautiful sunset.<\/p>\n

These will be available in a special \u201cAcme Labs\u201d section of the app, and Grossman said they\u2019ll be conservative with their predictions, given the difficulty.<\/p>\n

\"\"Image Credits:Acme Weather<\/p>\n

Users will also be able to customize their notifications to focus on weather events they care about, like wind or UV index, or the possibility of rain over the next 24 hours.<\/p>\n

Being able to try new ideas is part of what drew the team back to building an indie app, Grossman noted.<\/p>\n

\u201cI absolutely love Apple\u00a0\u2026 but as a big company, it\u2019s difficult to try weird, new, experimental ideals. If you have a billion users, mistakes are costly,\u201d he tells TechCrunch. \u201cThere\u2019s long software development cycles, there\u2019s a lot of stakeholders, this idea of being able to try a bunch of things, I think, is interesting.\u201d<\/p>\n

Acme Weather is currently available on iOS. An Android version is planned. <\/p>\n

The team is bootstrapped and includes co-founders Josh Reyes<\/a> and Dan Abrutyn<\/a>, also previously of Dark Sky. The small workforce includes both former Dark Sky team members and new hires.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The creators of Dark Sky, who sold their popular weather app to Apple in March 2020, are back…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":486736,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[15425,74,2986,35483],"class_list":{"0":"post-486735","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-dark-sky","9":"tag-technology","10":"tag-weather","11":"tag-weather-apps"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/486735","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=486735"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/486735\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/486736"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=486735"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=486735"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=486735"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}