, and the API shut down in March. In the interim, Apple added some of Dark Sky’s tech into its own Weather app and replaced the Dark Sky API with its own tool called WeatherKit., and its API was easy to integrate and cheap to use. It also offered minute-to-minute weather data long before most other providers, which made those “it’s going to rain in 8 minutes” notifications possible.
With Dark Sky gone and WeatherKit unreliable, a lot of weather apps have started to integrate with multiple sources to make sure they’re always online and to offer the most accurate forecasts everywhere. It presents a tough UI challenge, though: giving users one digestible full-featured forecast is hard enough, let alone five or six slightly different ones.
As a result, many weather apps have switched to subscriptions — Carrot Weather now costs about $20 a year, and Hello Weather runs about $13 annually. That’s a steep price to replace an app that ostensibly comes free with your phone.