The team behind Dark Sky is stepping back into the spotlight with a brand-new weather app, and they’re promising a smarter, more trustworthy way to plan your day. After selling Dark Sky to Apple in March 2020, the creators have now launched Acme Weather, a fresh iOS weather forecasting app designed to go beyond the “single best guess” approach used by many weather apps.
Acme Weather’s big idea is simple: weather is hard to predict, so the app shouldn’t pretend there’s only one possible outcome. Instead of showing just one forecast line, Acme Weather supplements its primary forecast with alternate forecast paths. On its charts, those additional possibilities appear as faint gray lines, giving you a clearer sense of uncertainty and helping you judge whether conditions are locked in or still up in the air.
According to Dark Sky co-founder Adam Grossman, Acme Weather builds its forecasts using a mix of numerical weather prediction models along with satellite data, ground station observations, and radar. The goal is to deliver reliable local forecasts while also giving users more transparency into what could happen next—especially in situations where small timing shifts can change everything, like winter storms that could arrive as snow in the morning or turn into rain later in the day. Seeing multiple outcomes side-by-side can make it easier to plan travel, commutes, outdoor events, and anything else where timing matters.
This approach also hints at broader potential. The Dark Sky team previously offered a developer-focused weather API, and after the acquisition they worked on a toolkit that provided access to weather data by subscription. For Acme Weather, the team says they haven’t decided yet whether they’ll offer a developer API again. For now, Acme Weather is positioned as a consumer subscription app priced at $25 per year, with a two-week free trial. That subscription helps cover the costs of pulling in multiple forecasting models and data sources—resources that can be expensive at scale.
Building their own forecasting system also gives the team more freedom. Grossman says they’ve invested heavily in becoming their own “data provider,” which lets them create multiple forecasts and design the maps they want without relying on third-party map providers.
At launch, Acme Weather includes a strong lineup of weather maps and layers, including radar, lightning, rain and snow totals, wind, temperature, humidity, cloud cover, and hurricane tracks. There’s also a Community Reports feature that lets users share what they’re experiencing right now, helping improve real-time conditions and adding a human layer to what sensors and models report.
Fans of Dark Sky will recognize the focus on hyper-local conditions, especially precipitation timing. But Acme Weather is also leaning into something a little different: weather notifications that are both useful and, at times, just plain fun. Alongside alerts for rain, nearby lightning, community reports, and official severe weather warnings, the app plans to experiment with playful notifications like rainbow alerts or predictions for when you might catch a beautiful sunset. These experimental alerts will live in an “Acme Labs” area, and the team says it will be cautious about when it sends them, given how tricky those predictions can be.
Notifications are also designed to be flexible. Users can tailor alerts around the weather they personally care about—whether that’s wind, UV index, or simply the chance of rain in the next 24 hours—so the app feels more like a personalized weather assistant than a one-size-fits-all forecast feed.
Acme Weather is currently available on iOS, with an Android version planned for the future. The company is bootstrapped and led by co-founders Adam Grossman, Josh Reyes, and Dan Abrutyn, joined by a small team that includes both former Dark Sky contributors and new hires. The move back to an independent app, Grossman says, is largely about speed and experimentation—making it easier to try bold new ideas without the slow cycles and high-stakes constraints that come with building for massive platforms.
For anyone frustrated by weather apps that sound overly confident and still get it wrong, Acme Weather is betting that transparency—showing not just what might happen, but what else could happen—will make forecasting feel more honest, more practical, and ultimately more helpful.
