WeatherKit
WeatherKit offers valuable weather data for your apps and services to help people stay up to date on the latest conditions. Learn how to use Swift and REST APIs to access information about the current weather, 10-day hourly forecasts for temperature, expected precipitation, wind reports, the UV Index, and more. We’ll also share how WeatherKit can provide timely, hyperlocal weather information without compromising someone’s personal data or their privacy.
This is a big endeavor, but its existence shouldn’t come as a surprise—and not just because of the timeline for sunsetting the Dark Sky API. Apple loves having key technologies under its control and if you’ve scrolled down in the company’s Weather app pre-iOS 16 (or requested weather information via Siri), you’ve surely seen (or heard) that the weather data on Apple’s platform has historically been provided by The Weather Channel. It’s not hard to imagine that that reliance on a third party (much less have to display their logo in one of Apple’s prominent apps) for this critical data may have rankled the folks in Cupertino.
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WeatherKit provides a ton of data, including minute forecasts (specifically for precipitation), hourly forecasts, daily forecasts (up to 10 days), weather alerts, and a veritable tsunami of historical weather data for those who want to crunch the information to extrapolate trends. That means a lot of opportunity for apps to use weather data without having to go to a third-party source, which generally charge not insubstantial fees for access to their APIs.
Interesting that Dark Sky is just an Apple-branded REST API now, didn’t expect that it would stick around for non-Apple platforms.
WeatherKit is NOT completely free, but is super generous.
- Dark Sky gave 30k free/month. This is 500k free.
- Typical fee is $1 per 10k calls. This is $0.50 per 10k.
Looks to be roughly half of what the old Dark Sky API pricing was. ~20,000 requests/$1. Solid.
WeatherKit is only provided as a Swift API, with no class prefixes (😖)
Previously:
Update (2022-07-05): See also: Hacker News.
