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Dark Sky (for iPhone) Preview

This Apple-owned weather app has a slick design and hyper-local accuracy

By Max Eddy
Updated July 8, 2015

The Bottom Line

Unabashedly beautiful, Dark Sky makes the case for its steep fee with wonderful design and unique alerts that claim to warn you before it starts raining.

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Pros

  • Great design
  • Amazing globe radar
  • Precipitation alerts
  • Custom weather alerts
  • Crowd-sourcing option
  • Apple Watch integration

Cons

  • Pricey
  • Interface isn't customizable
  • Lacks in-depth weather information

iPhone apps have a reputation for quality, and Dark Sky ($3.99 at Apple App Store) certainly meets that bar, with its beautiful interface. The latest version of this weather app not only includes new features, like self-reporting and custom alerts, but it also offers a better focus on the most-important weather information. It's a great choice, and it's easily one of the best iPhone apps for checking the weather. It's just barely beaten out by Editors' Choice Weather Underground ($0.00 at Apple.com) .

Dark Sky is available in the App Store, and I tested it on an iPhone 6 . It's a bit pricey at $3.99, but it's a one-time fee instead of Weather Underground's $1.99 annual fee. The latest version of Dark Sky also features Apple Watch ($300.00 at eBay) integration.

Premium Appearance
Dark Sky is tightly designed around bold, black text over translucent panels that hint at the app's stunning radar map (more on that later). The design is more subtle than that of the beatiful Yahoo Weather , which is built around location-specific images from Flickr ($0.00 at Apple.com) users.

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Dark Sky (for iPhone)Dark Sky's main page shows the current conditions, current temperature (and whether it's rising or falling), and the day's forecast high and low temperatures. A new, vertical timeline shows the next 24 hours in 2-hour chunks along with the predicted high temperature and conditions. Scroll down, and you can also have the same graph show the chance of precipitation, wind speed and direction, humidity, and UV index. I really like this approach since it gives you useful, general information at a glance instead of focusing only on upcoming storms, as earlier versions of Dark Sky did.

This is all well and good, but weather nerds reading this are probably disappointed at the seeming lack of nitty-gritty details. Never fear: just tap the big circle and you can see the wind speed and direction, humidity, dew point, barometric pressure, and visibility. Tap the words Next Hour and you'll see a breakdown of predicted precipitation for, well, the next hour. A neat flourish: Dark Sky also notes where the nearest storm is taking place. However, this main page isn't quite as useful as Weather Underground's single-sentence comparative forecast, which tells you things like "Today will be cooler than yesterday."

Tapping the current location, displayed at the top of the screen, lets you search for any city you like. Your queries are automatically saved, so your important locations are always close at hand. Dark Sky also tells you where an "interesting storm" is taking place and lets you jump right to it. It's fun, and it deftly shows off the app's capabilities if your current weather is just too nice.

To the right of the main page is a forecast for the coming week, displaying weather conditions, chance of precipitation, and high and low temperatures. Tap one, and it opens to show more information using the same style graph from the main page. I really like that Dark Sky has tightened its design for a much more-comfortable, and informative, user experience. Another simple feature I appreciate: the forecast includes the sunrise and sunset time for the coming days. You'd be surprised how rare this information is in weather apps.

New to Dark Sky is a self-reporting feature, which lets you share weather conditions with a few taps. Dark Sky can also harvest pressure data from your iPhone 6. The developer writes that this data will be used to "dramatically improve" hyperlocal forecasts. However, a blog post makes it sound like actually incorporating crowd-sourced information is still a future goal.

Radar Map and Notifications
Dark Sky (for iPhone)Dark Sky's most-striking feature is its radar map, which shows storm systems and animates them over the course of a week—showing both historical and forecast data. It can also show air temperature. The map looks great on my iPhone 6, and it loads more quickly and smoothly than the radar map in any other weather app I've tested.

And did I mention that it shows all this on a fully interactive 3D globe? Because it does. Instead of just seeing your slice of Earth as a flat image, you see the whole wonderfully complex and eerily beautiful swirling movement of storms across the planet. It's impressive but also instructive; you clearly see how the movement of storm systems interact and get a better idea of the overall weather.

You can pinch-zoom for a more-local view, but the app badly needs a button to refocus the view on your current location. Without it, the radar and temperature globe is a lot of (very, very cool) window dressing. Weather Underground's radar map isn't as impressive, but it is focused on your current location.

The app's killer feature is its precipitation alerts, which the developer claims will warn you before snow, sleet, or hail even touches the ground near you. My testing doesn't gauge a weather service's accuracy, but my experience with Dark Sky's rain alerts continues to be mixed. I didn't receive a precipitation alert when a major storm rolled through overnight, but I did receive an alert a few days later before a storm struck. Whether it will save me the trouble of checking the weather before I pick up my solid gold mojito and lounge in the cronut pool on the PC Mag roof deck remain to be seen.

If smart alerts aren't your thing, you can also receive morning weather updates pushed to your phone every morning. You can also create custom alerts, fill-in-the-blank style, to monitor the weather conditions of your choice. These are great if you're wondering what to wear or if you should leave the air conditioning on for your pets when you head to work.

Sunny, For a Price
Dark Sky initially impressed me when I reviewed it last year with its stunning radar map globe and smart, beautiful design. It's improved on that with custom alerts, and intriguing self-reporting and crowd-sourcing features. I'm still not convinced that the app can warn you about impending storms, but that's been de-emphasized in favor of solid, useful weather information.

With this latest update, Dark Sky has gone from being merely interesting to eminently useful. Pick it up if beauty is your main criterion for purchasing an app. But if you're looking for customization, truly crunchy weather data, and a tried-and-tested crowd-sourced weather data, Editors' Choice Weather Underground is still your best bet.

Dark Sky (for iPhone)
Pros
  • Great design
  • Amazing globe radar
  • Precipitation alerts
  • Custom weather alerts
  • Crowd-sourcing option
  • Apple Watch integration
View More
Cons
  • Pricey
  • Interface isn't customizable
  • Lacks in-depth weather information
The Bottom Line

Unabashedly beautiful, Dark Sky makes the case for its steep fee with wonderful design and unique alerts that claim to warn you before it starts raining.

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About Max Eddy

Lead Security Analyst

Since my start in 2008, I've covered a wide variety of topics from space missions to fax service reviews. At PCMag, much of my work has been focused on security and privacy services, as well as a video game or two. I also write the occasional security columns, focused on making information security practical for normal people. I helped organize the Ziff Davis Creators Guild union and currently serve as its Unit Chair.

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Dark Sky (for iPhone) $3.99 at Apple App Store
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