Dark Sky Died March 2023. Here's the Drop-In Replacement Nobody Told You About Dark Sky died on March 31, 2023. Here's the playbook. For about a decade, Dark Sky was the weather API that every indie developer reached for first. Hyperlocal, minute-by-minute precipitation forecasts, a clean JSON schema that felt like it was designed by someone who had actually tried to build a weather widget, and pricing that scaled reasonably from side-project to production. Apple acquired the company in March 2020. Two years later Apple announced the API shutdown. A year after that the endpoints returned HTTP 410 Gone. A generation of apps went dark overnight. Apple's official successor, WeatherKit, is not a drop-in replacement. It's an iOS/macOS/watchOS framework that requires an Apple Developer membership ($99/year), signed JWT authentication with your Apple team ID, and a REST layer that emits a JSON schema completely unrelated to Dark Sky's.…