Open Dark Sky on an Android phone now and you get one line: the “app has shut down.”
The weather app ended support for Android and Wear OS over a weekend, and users reported it no longer worked. The cutoff took effect on August 1, a month later than first planned.
It was no surprise to anyone who had followed the news. Apple bought Dark Sky in March, and the shutdown was announced then. The original deadline was July 1, and it slipped by one month.
In the blog post announcing the acquisition, the Dark Sky developers said that joining Apple meant they could “reach far more people, with far more impact, than we ever could alone.” That came at the cost of Android, the world’s most popular mobile operating system.
Developers and the web version
Android users are not the only ones losing something. Several app developers on iOS and Android have long pulled their weather data from the Dark Sky API, and that is going away as well. They have until the end of next year to find and put in place another data source.
The web version of Dark Sky was due to close on the day Ars Technica published its report, but Apple extended that deadline and disabled embeds. No new date has been given. Until the web version stops working, Android users can still use it.
