I was a happy user of the Dark Sky weather app for many years. Even more than the localized and timely notifications (I live in a place with predictable weather) I appreciated its Apple Watch complications. I specifically used the three-line textual summary shown in the middle of the Modular face.

My preferred Apple Watch face, circa 2022

Apple acquired Dark Sky in 2020, incorporated many of its features into the built-in Weather app (with iOS 16/watchOS 10), and shut down the original app at the end of 2022. Unfortunately the complication layout was not carried over – the only large complications are multi-hour/day graphs that have too much information and are hard to see at a glance. On my iPhone, I first switched to Weather Line (RIP) and later to Weather Strip, but neither had a watch app. I considered CARROT Weather, which has customizable complications, as a possible replacement. However, it couldn’t replicate the same layout, and paying for a separate subscription just for a watch app seemed wasteful.

On the other hand my time is free, and I figured that with WeatherKit (the one good thing to come out of the Dark Sky acquisition), I could build my own complication that showed exactly what I wanted. I procrastinated doing this for more than a year (squinting at the Weather complication every morning and thinking “I should do something about this”) but I reached a lull in Infinite Mac development and decided to once again work on an Apple platform developed in this century. It turns out that my procrastination paid off: watchOS 9 introduced WidgetKit for complications and Xcode 15 made wireless debugging (the only option for Apple Watch development) more reliable.

After fighting a bit with my old nemesis, provisioning profiles, and figuring out how to get location access in a widget (which may change in the future), I had something up and running. WeatherKit makes it particularly easy to replicate the Dark Sky complication – there’s even a property to get an SF Symbol for the current conditions and pre-computed sunrise/sunset times. 

Weather Text is the resulting app - it has a minimal watch UI to request location access and show a preview, but the main focus is the complication/widget (which also shows up in Smart Stack).

I decided not to put the app on the App Store. WeatherKit has a limited free quota, and while it was unlikely that the app would suddenly boom in popularity, I didn’t want to worry about it. I could have made the app paid up-front to deter casual installs, but my App Store account is not set up for payments, and I didn’t want to go through the hassle of that.

The app is instead available via TestFlight, which is hopefully enough of a deterrent that I’ll remain under the free limit (and builds expiring every 90 days also gives me additional control). I would have thought that only going through the lightweight TestFlight approval would exempt me from review shenanigans. However, I still had to change my original icon, despite the presence of plenty of other dark background icons, including the original Dark Sky one.

Weather Text is a home cooked meal/hammer kind of app, mostly meant for me (though I’m not the only one who misses Dark Sky’s complications). I don’t have grand ambitions for it, it’s not a forever project (modulo minimal upkeep to make sure it works with new OS releases). Though modern platforms don’t have quite as much end-user programmability as they used to (though widget.json/Widget Construction Set and Scriptable look interesting), as a middle-aged gentleman programmer it’s nice to still be able to make them fit exactly to my needs.