A eulogy for Dark Sky, a data visualization masterpiece

On January 1, 2023, Apple sunsetted the Dark Sky mobile app on iOS. Apple purchased the company behind the popular weather application in early 2020, then announced that it would be shutting down the Dark Sky applications, and finally stated in 2022 that the forecast technology would be integrated into the Apple Weather app with iOS 16. Dark Sky was much more than just an API or a set of "Forecast technologies." The design of the Dark Sky mobile application represented a hallmark of information design because the team clearly obsessed over how people would actually use the app on a daily basis. The design of Dark Sky was so wonderful that I could understand the shape of the weather at a glance, even from a zoomed out view of the app. The default experience for the Dark Sky application is to show weather for the next 12 hours at my precise location. While many other weather apps focus on helping me understand the weather at the city level, the Dark Sky app differentiates itself by enabling me to understand the weather with a hyperlocal view. In the Dark Sky app, the "Temperature pills" representing the forecasted temperatures for the upcoming week preserve their existing magnitude more effectively in the visualization. Dark Sky started with publicly available data, augmented it with contextualized predictions, rigorously iterated on data visualization design, and packaged all of this into a contextualized experience to make weather data useful for me in my daily life.