When I first read "killing their competition" I thought it meant killing competition in the form of weather apps. That didn't make any sense to me since Apple makes no money off the Weather app. Only after re-reading that sentence a few times did I realize the OP meant killing Android.

That said, I don't believe that to be the issue either. Death by a thousand cuts, maybe, but I seriously doubt closing off one app from the Android ecosystem is going to do any damage whatsoever. I think this is more about the acquisition of talent and nothing more.

> That didn't make any sense to me since Apple makes no money off the Weather app

But now it won't have to pay for API access anymore, since they'll own the whole backend.

> Is this acquisition going to give more people access to a great weather app or less people access to a great weather app?

Perhaps more. It’s a matter of comparing all users of Dark Sky, including via the API and on Android, against the user base of iOS.

And perhaps they’ll be able to use the technology in other countries, bringing in more users than Dark Sky ever could.

Is it realy important that a greater number of people may someday use it in the medium term when in the short term there are less actual users and in the long term the potential is again less.

>And perhaps they’ll be able to use the technology in other countries, bringing in more users than Dark Sky ever could.

45% of ios users are well off Americans. Outside of the US 90% of phones are Android who won't be able to use it anymore.

> Perhaps more. It’s a matter of comparing all users of Dark Sky, including via the API and on Android, against the user base of iOS.

Not disagreeing with the following paragraph, but GP specifically asked about "access", and all of these iOS users already had access to Dark Sky; this strictly decreases access, even if more people end up using it.

What’s stopping someone from now making a truly great Android weather app? If anything it allows for more competition.