Acme Weather, a new app from the team behind Dark Sky, is now available on iOS with a $25-per-year subscription and a two-week free trial. It offers a primary forecast alongside alternate predictions to show how conditions could vary over the day. The app supplements its homegrown forecast with gray “forecast lines” on graphs that reflect other plausible outcomes drawn from multiple models. Android support is planned.
Co-founder Adam Grossman said the approach is meant to give people a clearer sense of confidence rather than a single best guess. “Forecasts are often wrong - it’s the weather, right? It’s one of the hardest things to predict,” he told TechCrunch. He said seeing varying outcomes on a timeline can help with winter storms, when models may diverge on whether precipitation falls as snow in the morning or arrives later as rain. “Being able to just see that right there on the timeline just gives you this intuitive sense of whether, do all the models agree, and you’re getting snow? Or do half of them say snow and half of them say rain?” he said. The app’s design presents those alternatives so users can quickly assess how tightly different projections cluster or spread apart, a visual cue that can reflect the reliability of the main forecast, The Verge reported.
Acme Weather’s forecasts draw on numerical weather prediction models, satellite data, ground station observations, and radar. The team built its own forecast pipeline to reduce reliance on third-party providers and to support multiple forecast outputs and custom maps. At launch, the app includes maps for radar, lightning, rain and snow totals, wind, temperature, humidity, cloud cover, and hurricane or storm tracks. The app also incorporates community reporting, allowing users to submit current conditions that appear as icons on a map to improve real-time coverage.
Notifications are a central part of the experience. Acme Weather supports user-customizable alerts for rain, nearby lightning, and government-issued severe weather warnings. It includes minute-by-minute rain warnings. In a dedicated “Acme Labs” section, the app will test alerts that try to predict when users might spot a rainbow or see an especially striking sunset, with a conservative approach to issuing those notifications given the challenge of getting them right. Beyond these experimental tools, users can tailor notifications to emphasize wind, UV index, or the likelihood of rain over the next 24 hours.
The release marks a return to indie app-building for the original Dark Sky team after leaving Apple, which acquired Dark Sky in 2020 and later integrated some of its features into Apple Weather. Grossman said the move back to a small operation allows faster iteration and experimentation. “I absolutely love Apple…but as a big company, it’s difficult to try weird, new, experimental ideas. If you have a billion users, mistakes are costly,” he said. The team behind Acme Weather includes co-founders Josh Reyes and Dan Abrutyn, alongside former Dark Sky colleagues and new hires, and the company is bootstrapped.
The app’s core philosophy is to be transparent about uncertainty and to enlist users in improving coverage. Alternate predictions sit beside the primary forecast to signal when models agree or when outcomes may diverge, a presentation intended to help with everyday planning and major events alike. Community reports feed back into the experience through simple on-map indicators of nearby conditions. In addition to subscriptions that fund the data costs of running multiple weather models and building custom maps, Acme Weather says it will not sell user information to third parties such as advertisers. Grossman framed the launch as a response to dissatisfaction with current mobile weather tools and a desire to capture the agility of a small shop. “It’s the weather app we’ve always wanted, and always wanted to build,” he said.
This article was produced with the assistance of an news exploration technology.