Dark Sky creators launch new weather app Acme Weather

The team behind Dark Sky—the weather app acquired by Apple in March 2020—has launched a new weather forecasting service called Acme Weather. The founders claim the new app offers a better and more reliable forecast than Dark Sky by displaying alternative weather outcomes alongside its primary predictions. Rather than presenting a single best guess, Acme Weather aims to improve transparency by showing alternative possibilities as gray lines on its graphs, allowing users to visualize the range of potential weather scenarios.

Acme Weather is a consumer subscription app priced at $25-per-year, following a two-week free trial. The team, which includes co-founders Adam Grossman, Josh Reyes, and Dan Abrutyn, adopted this subscription model to maintain the agility to experiment. Grossman, a Dark Sky co-founder who previously worked at Apple after the acquisition, noted the challenges of trying new ideas within a large company. “I absolutely love Apple … but as a big company, it’s difficult to try weird, new, experimental ideals. If you have a billion users, mistakes are costly,” Grossman said.

To deliver this transparency, Acme Weather’s forecasts leverage multiple numerical weather prediction models, satellite data, ground station observations, and radar data. The app also features Community Reports, which allow users to share real-time weather conditions. This multi-model approach is designed to show users how certain a forecast is for events like rain or storms over the next 24 hours. Grossman noted that weather is inherently difficult to predict and forecasts are frequently incorrect. He added that a major issue with many weather apps is that they only present a single best guess without indicating the level of certainty behind it.

At launch, the app is available on iOS, though an Android version is planned. Additionally, the team has not yet decided if a developer API will be part of the Acme Weather offering. At Dark Sky, the team had previously offered a developer API, and later worked on creating WeatherKit, the developer toolkit for Apple’s weather data. For now, the team is focusing on the consumer app, which includes notifications for weather events and experimental features housed in a dedicated Acme Labs section of the app.

Why it matters

The launch highlights the tension between the scale of large companies and the agility required to experiment with new, transparent forecasting models that prioritize user certainty over simple “best guess” predictions. By returning to a subscription model, the creators of Dark Sky are testing whether consumers will pay for forecast transparency.