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, then the App visuals section.
3. In the layout picker, choose Vertical layout.

That is it. You do not need Pro for this, and there is no trial clock on it. The same choice is available as the Vertical preset in the Looks gallery, which is also free.

Inside the vertical view, two controls sit directly under the column rather than in a settings screen. The range control cycles through 8 hours, Today, 2 days and 3 days—the two short ranges give you a row per hour, the two long ones step in two hours so more of the week fits on screen. Next to it, the metric button switches what the column reports: temperature, rain, rain probability, wind, wind and gusts, humidity, dew point, UV index, cloudiness or pressure. Both of those were the most common complaints when the layout first shipped in January 2023; both are now in the app, and neither is behind Pro.

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—the value labels sit further right the higher the value, so the column reads as a chart
Minute-by-minute "rain starting in 12 minutes"	Close, not identical. The Rainbow.ai nowcast runs at roughly 1 km resolution in 1-minute steps, up to 4 hours ahead, and rain alerts warn you before it starts*
One forecast model, no choice	Different by design—you pick the source: Foreca, Yr.no, Apple Weather, Open-Meteo, Pirate Weather or the US National Weather Service*
Wind direction as arrows	In the horizontal graph, wind is drawn as arrows sized by speed; the gust variant, which adds a second chevron behind the arrowhead, is Pro
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

* Which forecast and nowcast sources are available on the free tier is a business decision, not a fixed one, and it has moved between releases. The source picker marks what your build offers.

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. Free.
• Tap a day to expand it. In the daily forecast, tapping a day row opens the hour-by-hour detail for that date. Free—though the free tier's daily forecast itself stops at three days.
• Source choice. Dark Sky was locked to its own model. If a source consistently misreads your valley or your coastline, you can switch between six of them.
• Apple Watch complications. Dark Sky's watch support was thin. This is the part of Weathergraph that most reviewers single out. Pro.
• Multiple locations, added well after the layout shipped. Pro.
• 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 three choices in that picker, not a replacement for the others. The horizontal graph shows a whole week as a single dense strip—temperature, rain, wind and cloud on one timeline, with UV index, dew point and pressure as further layers on Pro. It is a different reading skill, and it is the reason the app is called Weathergraph.

You do not have to choose once and for all. The third option, Dual view, stacks both: the graph on top for the week ahead, the vertical column below for today. And if you would rather keep the app on the vertical layout alone, the horizontal graph still reaches you through widgets and watch faces, which are a Pro feature.

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 range 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.