The best iPhone weather app is shutting down, but this cloud has a silver lining

Apple is warning users of the Dark Sky weather app that it will cease to be as of January 1 next year.

Support for Dark Sky, which became popular due to its enhanced forecasting technology and live radar imagery in the early App Store era, is ending, according to a persistent warning within the app.

Apple purchased Dark Sky (and the team behind it) in March 2020 and has slowly been using the tech and talent to improve its own weather app. That process is now complete, so there’s no need to keep the standalone app around, regardless of how much users know and love it.

“Support for the Dark Sky app will be ending on January 1 2023. Dark Sky’s forecast technology is now enhanced and integrated into the updated Apple Weather app,” the note reads.

A button promising More Info annoyingly redirects to the Apple Weather app. So does the Apple Weather app really replace everything we loved about Dark Sky? Well, yeah, pretty much. And a lot of the information is presented in a more attractive fashion.

There’s the radar map, hourly forecast, graph showing the chance of rain in the next hour, and the opportunity to dial deeper into data like the UV index, wind speed, ‘feels like’ temperature, humidity, visibility and more, throughout the day.

When Apple purchased the app it immediately shut down the Android and Wear OS versions, making it clear this was going to form the basis of its efforts to revamp the Apple Weather app. The company often does this when it plans to integrate new features within the operating system. Shazam, for example, is now an iOS staple within the Control Centre, while Apple’s sleep tracking tech is powered by the Beddit app it also purchased many moons ago.