For me, one of the key features of an inReach is the ability to get a weather report in remote areas.
Unfortunately, the provider chosen by Garmin, DarkSky, is a weather service branded as "hyperlocal" with the goal of providing local minute-to-minute forecasts in urban areas.
I have seen many complaints about the quality of the forecast in the mountains, the weather feature has been called "useless" on this forum https://forums.garmin.com/outdoor-recreation/inreach/f/inreach-mini/169222/weather-report-via-inreach-for-mountaineers
According to the post above, DarkSky does not even take altitude into account.
I suspect that DarkSky is based on the free NWS model + some machine learning correction based on sensors in cities. That does not sound very trustworthy for mountaineering. Already the GFS model used by NWS is generally not performing that well in the mountains, despite switching to a new solver recently, but at least it is well understood and not going to change suddenly without a warning. Also, it is permanently benchmarked against other models and any issue would become public immediately, which is not the case for DarkSky. If their model runs amok in a remote area, you might never hear about it.
Just recently, smoke has completely thrown off the weather forecasts used by smartphones, predicting temperatures too high by 20F, while the NWS model stayed reliable: cliffmass.blogspot.com/.../smoke-has-caused-temperature-forecasts.html
I haven't found any benchmarks of the DarkSky forecasts, but in my limited experience in the past it did not perform well at outside of big metro areas. I personally use Windy and Meteoblue.
When DarkSky was bought by Apple they stopped selling new API keys or supporting Android. I am not sure if Garmin is affected by this or if they reached a separate agreement, but it adds another layer of problems to the weather forecast. How do I know that they don't switch to a worse provider in the future?
Is there any plan to replace the DarkSky weather forecast with a more trustworthy forecast? The best choice would be ECMWF (which outperforms GFS in the mountains).
