Dark Sky founders launch Acme Weather with new forecasting

The original creators of the popular weather app Dark Sky, which was acquired by Apple in March 2020, have returned to the market with a new project: Acme Weather. The independent app aims to provide higher reliability by moving away from the “single best guess” approach common in many current weather services.

Transparency in Forecasting

Co-founder Adam Grossman noted that the team’s primary frustration with existing weather apps is the lack of context regarding forecast confidence. Acme Weather addresses this by incorporating multiple numerical prediction models, satellite imagery, radar data, and ground station observations.

Instead of presenting a single, potentially misleading line, the app displays secondary possibilities as gray lines on its graphs. This allows users to visualize how much consensus exists among different models—a feature Grossman finds particularly useful for complex events like winter storms, where the difference between rain and snow can be marginal.

Features and Business Model

Acme Weather is built to be a consumer-facing product, charging $25 per year after a two-week free trial to offset the high costs of accessing premium weather data models. While the team previously developed Apple’s WeatherKit, they have not yet confirmed if a developer-facing API will be part of the new company’s roadmap.

The app includes a variety of specialized tools and community-driven features:

• Data Visualization: Maps covering radar, lightning, precipitation totals, wind, humidity, and hurricane tracking.
• Community Reports: Users can submit local observations to enhance real-time accuracy.
• Acme Labs: An experimental section featuring unique notifications, such as predictions for rainbows or high-quality sunset conditions.

Returning to Indie Roots

For Grossman and his co-founders, Josh Reyes and Dan Abrutyn, the shift back to an indie app environment is driven by the desire for creative agility. Grossman explained that at a company the size of Apple, experimental features carry significant risk, and development cycles are often slowed by numerous stakeholders.

“I absolutely love Apple… but as a big company, it’s difficult to try weird, new, experimental ideals,” Grossman said. “If you have a billion users, mistakes are costly.”

Acme Weather is currently available for iOS, with plans for an Android version already in development. The bootstrapped venture consists of a small team combining former Dark Sky personnel and new hires.