Say hello to Weather Machine
We built an all-new universal API adapter for the world’s best forecasts. Now available for everyone.
Today we’re excited to announce a new product that we’ve been working on for a long time. It's called Weather Machine, and it’s a powerful developer tool that greatly simplifies integrating weather data into your application.
If you’ve ever tried to use a weather API, you probably already know the challenges. Weather APIs are notoriously complicated—every vendor offers their own proprietary data structures and request formats, and they vary in performance, price, accuracy, and reliability. Sometimes services disappear or get shut down entirely. It’s complex, time-consuming, and expensive to work with these systems, which distracts from the main thing you’re trying to do: building a great app!
We learned about all of this the hard way. For the past several years, we’ve spent countless hours developing a sophisticated multi-provider architecture for Hello Weather, to solve these problems for ourselves.
Eventually, our tech got so good that it didn't make sense to keep it a secret. We wanted to bring these advancements to everyone, so we rewrote the whole thing into a standalone product, and it’s available to use today.
With Weather Machine, you can write just one integration for your app and get highly accurate global forecasts from The Weather Company, AccuWeather, AerisWeather, and many other reputable sources. It’s drop-in compatible with Dark Sky's API formats, so you can switch over in minutes. And it includes an advanced forecast-aware caching system, which can cut your data usage up to 50%, saving you money without sacrificing any speed or accuracy.
Since the Dark Sky API is shutting down soon, we’re running an introductory promo period for Weather Machine: you can sign up and use it for free through March 31, 2023. (You’ll also need to have a paid account with the provider(s) you choose to use in lieu of Dark Sky.)
If you’re a developer, go check out Weather Machine and give it a shot. We’d love to hear what you think.
P.S. Special shout out to Nicky Leach, Dan Kim, Kasper Timm Hansen, Scott McMillin, Gustavo Cunha, Alexander Rey, Geoff Buesing, and Samuel Williams for their help with this project.
But wait, what’s up with Hello Weather?
Not to worry: our infrastructure isn’t the only thing that got a rewrite. We’ve also been hard at work building a completely new version of Hello Weather from scratch! (Frankly, we’re a little overly ambitious.)
Soon we’ll share info about a TestFlight beta for early adopters, so keep your eyes peeled for that. It’s gonna be great, and we can’t wait to get it in your hands.
If you have any questions about any of this, feel free to contact us here or on Mastodon.