Does anyone know why apple acquired them just to shut it down?
It doesn’t seem like the weather data was unique - what was unique was its user focussed design.
To acquire it just to shut it down would have only made sense to me had they actually folded the design of dark sky into their weather app and put their founders in charge of the app. Doesn’t seem like that happened
The weather data actually was pretty unique in that a lot of the rain / snow predictions were based on visually analysing the satellite imagery. I'd understand buying it just for that reason, but to then seemingly leave that out of the stock weather app seems bizarre. (I'm guessing they haven't ported that to the stock app as the stock app is dreadful at predicting imminent rain)
Did Apple include the local weather prediction in their app? That was the other impressive part of Dark Sky. The combination of prediction and design was why Dark Sky was so good.
I use Android and never used the nice app, but used the predictions in other apps. Knowing when it was going to rain was really handy. Apps now their own predictions but not as good.
The Dark Sky API was very popular, and at the time many weather apps on iOS did sketchy things with people's data. I sensed that Apple maybe wanted to provide a free weather API for weather apps to make it easier for anyone to make a weather app.
It doesn’t seem like the weather data was unique - what was unique was its user focussed design.
To acquire it just to shut it down would have only made sense to me had they actually folded the design of dark sky into their weather app and put their founders in charge of the app. Doesn’t seem like that happened