Dark Sky is discontinuing their API and Android app after joining Apple. It was my favorite weather app, both from a data and UX perspective. They apparently aggregate from many different sources to have the best predictions and world wide coverage. I’m not sure I actually need all of that and am curious to make my own solution.

Making my own app

This seems like a great opportunity to learn Flutter. It’s been a while since I’ve done mobile development. I did both native Android and iOS as well as React Native. I’m not too keen to be building two of everything and React Native was a tooling nightmare for me.

Flutter seems like a great solution especially with its component driven concepts. However, in order to make a weather app you actually need the forecast data.

Getting the forecast

I looked at using the National Weather Service API at weather.gov, but it seems it only has data for a specific Kansas station at the moment. This kind of kills the project for the time being, but I hope to find the info elsewhere.

I saw Aaron Parecki seems to use Wunderground to get current weather for his posts. I’ll have to see what their API is like and if there are agreeable terms.

I believe the National Weather Service also publishes the data in a not so convenient format. I could look into downloading that periodically and exposing it myself. Maybe I could use my phone location to only download the info that I’m most likely to care about.