Comment by yreg
3 years ago
The article makes it sound like Apple just used Dark Sky as a backend and threw everything else away.
In fact it seems that they inspired heavily from Dark Sky's UI as well. In my opinion iOS now has a very clever and polished Weather app that contains many of the features mentioned in the article.
Some screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/GYP3ym8
You’re correct. I used Dark Sky for years and switched to the default iOS app when Apple bought Dark Sky and added all of the functionality to Weather.
I did prefer the design of Dark Sky, since the data was larger and more visually separate from the background, allowing it to be more readable at a glance. But I found that after the big update they had essentially the same functionality and the same UI.
It is not the same UI
It might be functionally the same e.g. It only shows conditions for the next 5 hours - not all day - how can you tell if you need a raincopat if you go ot. I am on an iPhone in portrait mode. DarkSky showed this as a column of data Weather as a row. This is fundamental to the whole UI.
Author here -- Apple was definitely inspired by Dark Sky but IMO it's hard to argue that it's a replacement.
If you compare the # of clicks it takes and the amount of time it takes to interpret information for the same task for Dark Sky vs the Apple Weather app, it becomes clear that the Apple Weather app "isn't quite there yet". But I hope it will be soon!
If your needs are straightforward, then the Weather app is a pretty good replacement.