Is Apple's Acquisition of Dark Sky Weather App Anti-Competitive?
One of the most well-designed apps is now an iOS exclusive. In a surprise development, Apple has acquired popular hyperlocal weather app Dark Sky and will be shutting down its Android and Wear OS apps in July.
"Our goal has always been to provide the world with the best weather information possible, to help as many people as we can stay dry and safe, and to do so in a way that respects your privacy," Dark Sky co-founder Adam Grossman announced the acquisition in a blog post. "There is no better place to accomplish these goals than at Apple."
The product launched in 2012 and remained an iOS-only app for four years, before it finally introduced an Android version in 2016.
Dark Sky's branding on its website has already been updated to "Dark Sky by Apple." The weather prediction and visualisation service uses radar data pulled from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and leverages Fast Artificial Neural Network (FANN) to separate noise (e.g. bird migrations) and OpenCV, an open-source computer vision library, to extract storm velocity as an image and subsequently predict precipitation and weather conditions down to the minute.
While the app continues to be available for iOS users (for US$ 3.99/year), the Android and Wear OS versions will cease to exist effective July 1, with access to Dark Sky API sunsetting in 2022. The death of the API (Dark Sky has already stopped taking new signups) means popular third-party apps such as Carrot Weather, Runkeeper, Yelp, and others will have to look for other alternatives to source their weather data.
Even Dark Sky's website hasn't escaped the culling, which means all the weather forecasts, maps, and embeds will end after the July cut off date.
An update to stock Weather app
Apple's purchase of Dark Sky ultimately could herald a much needed update to the native weather app, which hasn't seen a major overhaul since iOS 7. The next year, in 2014, Apple did make a small change though, switching from Yahoo! Weather to The Weather Channel (which is owned by IBM) as the source of weather information.
With Dark Sky employing its own means to gather data, it's possible that Apple will no longer have to pay IBM fees to license data from weather.com for its stock Weather app. But in choosing to buying it outright and restricting the service to its environs and shutting out others (Android, web users, and other third-party developers), the iPhone maker has effectively pulled an anti-competitive stunt that benefits no one but itself.
That being said, it's definitely possible that Dark Sky wasn't serious about its Android ambitions — and if they were, they wouldn't have killed the Android app, would they? — and treated it as a temporary revenue stream while focussing their major efforts on iOS.
Viewed in this light, teaming up with Apple, a first-party platform, is likely to be a strategic move for the company as it's odds-on that it'll reach a larger section of users: Imagine Dark Sky being rebranded and installed as the default weather app on every iPhone and iPad. (On a side note, I have always used Apple's built-in Weather app, both for the fact that it's simple and doesn't violate privacy by exposing your location to third-parties.)
To monopolise or not?
The acquisition also comes barely months after the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) began its investigation into big tech companies, including Alphabet (Google's parent company), Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft, and their acquisition practices over the past decade for unfairly using their clout to defend market share or expand into adjacent markets.
"The Commission plans to use the information obtained in this study to examine trends in acquisitions and the structure of deals ... and the nature and extent of other agreements that may restrict competition," the FTC said earlier this February. "The Commission also seeks to learn more about how small firms perform after they are acquired by large technology firms."
Compared to Amazon's purchase of Ring and Whole Foods, Facebook's purchase of Instagram and WhatsApp, Google's acquisitions of DoubleClick, Fitbit, Nest, and Waze, and Microsoft's buying of GitHub and LinkedIn, Apple's purchase of Dark Sky is a drop in the ocean. (With the exception of its US$ 3 billion purchase of headphone and streaming company Beats in 2014, Apple has typically made small deals valued at less than US$ 500 million over the past decade, mostly snapping up companies dabbling in AI, AR, and camera sensors.)
But it's also clearly another subtle way of pushing users to its ecosystem of apps and services, just as it inserts itself as a middleman in an ever-growing number of transactions that it hopes will lock loyal users into its walled garden.
The product launched in 2012 and remained an iOS-only app for four years, before it finally introduced an Android version in 2016.
Dark Sky's branding on its website has already been updated to "Dark Sky by Apple." The weather prediction and visualisation service uses radar data pulled from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and leverages Fast Artificial Neural Network (FANN) to separate noise (e.g. bird migrations) and OpenCV, an open-source computer vision library, to extract storm velocity as an image and subsequently predict precipitation and weather conditions down to the minute.
While the app continues to be available for iOS users (for US$ 3.99/year), the Android and Wear OS versions will cease to exist effective July 1, with access to Dark Sky API sunsetting in 2022. The death of the API (Dark Sky has already stopped taking new signups) means popular third-party apps such as Carrot Weather, Runkeeper, Yelp, and others will have to look for other alternatives to source their weather data.
Even Dark Sky's website hasn't escaped the culling, which means all the weather forecasts, maps, and embeds will end after the July cut off date.
An update to stock Weather app
Apple's purchase of Dark Sky ultimately could herald a much needed update to the native weather app, which hasn't seen a major overhaul since iOS 7. The next year, in 2014, Apple did make a small change though, switching from Yahoo! Weather to The Weather Channel (which is owned by IBM) as the source of weather information.
With Dark Sky employing its own means to gather data, it's possible that Apple will no longer have to pay IBM fees to license data from weather.com for its stock Weather app. But in choosing to buying it outright and restricting the service to its environs and shutting out others (Android, web users, and other third-party developers), the iPhone maker has effectively pulled an anti-competitive stunt that benefits no one but itself.
That being said, it's definitely possible that Dark Sky wasn't serious about its Android ambitions — and if they were, they wouldn't have killed the Android app, would they? — and treated it as a temporary revenue stream while focussing their major efforts on iOS.
Viewed in this light, teaming up with Apple, a first-party platform, is likely to be a strategic move for the company as it's odds-on that it'll reach a larger section of users: Imagine Dark Sky being rebranded and installed as the default weather app on every iPhone and iPad. (On a side note, I have always used Apple's built-in Weather app, both for the fact that it's simple and doesn't violate privacy by exposing your location to third-parties.)
To monopolise or not?
The acquisition also comes barely months after the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) began its investigation into big tech companies, including Alphabet (Google's parent company), Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft, and their acquisition practices over the past decade for unfairly using their clout to defend market share or expand into adjacent markets.
"The Commission plans to use the information obtained in this study to examine trends in acquisitions and the structure of deals ... and the nature and extent of other agreements that may restrict competition," the FTC said earlier this February. "The Commission also seeks to learn more about how small firms perform after they are acquired by large technology firms."
Compared to Amazon's purchase of Ring and Whole Foods, Facebook's purchase of Instagram and WhatsApp, Google's acquisitions of DoubleClick, Fitbit, Nest, and Waze, and Microsoft's buying of GitHub and LinkedIn, Apple's purchase of Dark Sky is a drop in the ocean. (With the exception of its US$ 3 billion purchase of headphone and streaming company Beats in 2014, Apple has typically made small deals valued at less than US$ 500 million over the past decade, mostly snapping up companies dabbling in AI, AR, and camera sensors.)
But it's also clearly another subtle way of pushing users to its ecosystem of apps and services, just as it inserts itself as a middleman in an ever-growing number of transactions that it hopes will lock loyal users into its walled garden.
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