Missing Dark Sky? Set up Weathergraph's vertical layout

Dark Sky shut down on 1 January 2023. Apple had bought it in March 2020 and folded its forecast technology into the built-in Weather app—but the thing people actually miss was never the data. It was the information design: a vertical timeline you scrolled down, where the shape of the day was legible before you read a single number.

Weathergraph has that shape. It is called the vertical layout, it lives in the app preferences, and it is free—no purchase or subscription required.

The quick answer

• Switch to the vertical layout in the app preferences. That is the whole setup. It is available on the free tier with no time limit.
• You get a scrollable column with a colour-coded condition bar, temperature labels on the right forming a visual temperature chart, in two-hour steps or hour by hour.
• It covers up to three days ahead, and you can change which metric the column shows without leaving the vertical view.
• Two things Dark Sky never did: sunny hours are highlighted, and tapping a day in the daily forecast opens the detailed hour-by-hour view for that date.

What Dark Sky actually did

It helps to be precise about what is being replaced, because "Dark Sky alternative" usually means one specific screen rather than the whole app.

• A vertical hourly timeline, front and centre. Not a horizontal carousel, not a table. A coloured vertical bar for cloud cover and precipitation, with temperature as a stylised bar graph beside it. The next 24 hours took about half a scroll.
• Temperature magnitudes preserved across the week. Ranges were not rescaled row by row, so a cold day looked colder than a warm one and comparison was immediate.
• Precipitation as categories, not false precision. "Light", "medium", "heavy" rather than "0.25 in"—because the underlying forecast does not support that precision anyway.
• Wind direction as arrows instead of the text "NW", so a changing wind was legible by shape.
• Next-hour precipitation in plain language. "Light rain starting in 12 minutes."

The clearest account of why this worked is Nightingale's eulogy for Dark Sky, which describes the app as turning nearly everything into a context-sensitive information graphic.

Turning on the vertical layout

1. Open Weathergraph on your iPhone.
2. Go to the app preferences.
3. Choose the vertical layout.

That is it. You do not need Pro for this, and there is no trial clock on it.

Inside the vertical view you can set the interval—two-hour steps for more days on screen, or hour by hour for detail—and switch which metric the column displays, without dropping back out to a settings screen. Both of those were the most common complaints when the layout first shipped in January 2023; both are now in the app.

What matches, and what does not

Dark Sky	Weathergraph's vertical layout
Vertical scrolling hourly timeline	Yes—two-hour steps or hourly, up to three days ahead
Colour-coded condition bar	Yes—blue for precipitation, through grey for cloudiness, to yellow for sun
Temperature as a visual chart beside the timeline	Yes—temperature labels on the right form the chart
Minute-by-minute "rain starting in 12 minutes"	Close, not identical. The Rainbow.ai nowcast predicts precipitation at roughly 10-minute precision and alerts you before it starts
One forecast model, no choice	Different by design—you pick the source (Yr.no free; Foreca, Apple Weather, Open-Meteo, Pirate Weather and NWS with Pro)
Wind direction as arrows	In the horizontal graph, wind is drawn as arrows with double arrows for gusts
Free after a one-off purchase, then free	Free tier with no time limit; Pro is a yearly subscription or a one-time "Forever" purchase

Be clear-eyed about the last row. If what you want is specifically Dark Sky's exact pixel layout, nothing is going to give you that—the app is gone and its screens are not coming back. What the vertical layout gives you is the same reading experience: a column you scan downward, where the day's shape arrives before the numbers do.

Where it goes further than Dark Sky

• Sunny hours are highlighted. Dark Sky told you when it would rain; the vertical layout also tells you when to go outside.
• Tap a day to expand it. In the daily forecast, tapping a day row opens the hour-by-hour detail for that date.
• Source choice. Dark Sky was locked to its own model. If a source consistently misreads your valley or your coastline, you can switch.
• Apple Watch complications. Dark Sky's watch support was thin. This is the part of Weathergraph that most reviewers single out.
• Multiple locations, added after the layout shipped.
• A one-time purchase option. "Forever" is the deal a lot of Dark Sky users say they wish they had had.

If you want the horizontal graph too

The vertical layout is one of two views, not a replacement for the other. The horizontal graph shows a whole week as a single dense strip—temperature, rain, wind, UV, cloud, dew point layered on one timeline. It is a different reading skill, and it is the reason the app is called Weathergraph.

Plenty of people run the vertical layout in the app for the daily "what is happening today" read, and put the horizontal graph on a widget or a watch face for the week ahead. You do not have to choose once and for all.

Sources and limits

• A Eulogy for Dark Sky, a Data Visualization Masterpiece is the best account of the original app's design decisions.
• Apple's Dark Sky shutdown notice covers the timeline and what moved into the built-in Weather app.
• Weathergraph's vertical layout was announced in its January 2023 press release; the interval and metric controls described above were added since.
• Feature availability and source lists change between releases. The app's own preferences are the product truth—this guide describes the current build, not a permanent contract.