00:00:00 ◼ ► Brian Mueller, welcome to the show. I asked you just before we started whether your surname was pronounced like Robert Mueller of Mueller Report fame, and it turns out it's not. Is this something that people with your surname have to go through all of life?
00:00:13 ◼ ► Yeah, especially after all the news with that. But yeah, it just rhymes with Ferris Bueller. I get that all the time instead.
00:00:23 ◼ ► I have been meaning to have you on the show for so long, and I feel like, anyway, you are the developer, author, mastermind, owner, I don't know what your title is, behind Carrot Weather.
00:00:35 ◼ ► And a whole suite of other applications, but I think it's safe to say Carrot Weather is the flagship. Is that correct?
00:00:43 ◼ ► Yeah, it started with Carrot To Do, the to-do list, and basically made a new app every few months until I ended on Carrot Weather, and that ended up being the most popular by far, and just took up all my time.
00:00:59 ◼ ► And so I basically have to spend all my time now on Carrot Weather, and I'm stuck, stuck on it. I can't do anything else anymore.
00:01:09 ◼ ► It's the curse of success of the indie developer, right? And I've seen this pattern for decades. I was going to say years, but there are so many bare-bones software springs to mind where bare-bones used to have more.
00:01:22 ◼ ► I mean, they still have Yojimbo a little bit, but it's sort of the BB Edit company. I could think of other examples.
00:01:27 ◼ ► Tapbots has a suite of applications, but their social media apps, Tweetbot and Ivory sort of are the one that takes up all the time.
00:01:41 ◼ ► No, when Weather came out, or when I was working on Weather, anyhow, I just thought that it was going to be another app, and then I'd keep doing more and more of them after that.
00:01:53 ◼ ► I was honestly glad when it was that successful that I didn't have to keep making new apps because I was sick of—the thing that I hate most about working on apps is, like, the promotion part of it and, like, having to make videos and reach out to press and all that kind of stuff.
00:02:12 ◼ ► And so Carrot Weather being so successful freed me from having to do that constant marketing cycle.
00:02:26 ◼ ► But it works to some extent, where you always send me emails with announcements of major new versions or new apps when you do have a new app.
00:02:37 ◼ ► And, you know, as much as it can seem like it lands on deaf ears, it registers because here you are.
00:02:47 ◼ ► Yeah, it's been—and it was really cool starting out because I knew nobody in the industry when I started.
00:02:55 ◼ ► I was just doing cold emails to people when Carrot2Do launched, and I got 26 downloads on the first day.
00:03:02 ◼ ► And with each update to that app and each successive app that I launched, I got, like, new press outlets covering it, and each one did better than the last.
00:03:15 ◼ ► And it's just—it was cool having that growth and being able to feel like the apps were getting more and more successful as time went on.
00:03:31 ◼ ► That got the most attention, I think, of all the apps in terms of having more of a mainstream breakout.
00:03:43 ◼ ► And then I got all of these, like, mainstream, like, producers from, like, Good Morning America and stuff calling or emailing me and calling me at the real job that I had at the time.
00:04:01 ◼ ► And, yeah, it was surreal having camera people coming from Good Morning America to my house and filming in my kitchen and stuff.
00:04:19 ◼ ► So, for anybody who's not familiar, I presume carrot weather is a big enough hit that most people listening are at least vaguely familiar with the premise.
00:04:28 ◼ ► But the whole suite of apps has, and from the get-go, has had a, what would you call it, a gimmick?
00:04:58 ◼ ► And it was always like this, if they had any kind of personality to it at all with the gamification,
00:05:10 ◼ ► you did an amazing job, you got an achievement, or you went up a level, or that kind of stuff.
00:05:19 ◼ ► And I just really liked the idea of having this, like, snarky character in there that would, like, make fun of you
00:05:37 ◼ ► And that's sort of, for better or for worse, let's hold up Apple's modern design aesthetic as the definition.
00:06:11 ◼ ► And Apple, I guess, leans into that a little bit with some of the fitness stuff, like on Apple Watch, right?
00:06:28 ◼ ► It's like, if I was wearing my Apple Watch yesterday, that means I slept all day, right?
00:06:37 ◼ ► So there are places where Apple takes a little bit of an attitude and where they do, it's a little saccharine.
00:06:56 ◼ ► And I actually, the first four apps, they all had like the base carrot personality, but I definitely took some of that feedback to heart in weather.
00:07:08 ◼ ► And there's actually five different personality levels in weather now so that people who don't care about the personality and don't like that aspect of the app at all, they can just turn that off and have the app in like professional mode.
00:07:51 ◼ ► I think when you first went in the onboarding, I think it's in the middle and you can move it in either direction.
00:08:03 ◼ ► I guess it speaks to how good of a weather app it is just for the weather that the option to take the personality out is there and desired by some users.
00:08:14 ◼ ► But at the beginning, at the outset, it was the sort of defining characteristic of your whole suite of apps.
00:08:23 ◼ ► It was just like a gimmick joke weather app that literally the idea behind it was just there's it would be great to have a weather app that told a bunch of jokes.
00:08:36 ◼ ► And it was easy to imagine I could have a bunch of jokes about the different weather conditions, like whether it's sunny or rainy or whatever, and then the seasons and then the temperature.
00:08:52 ◼ ► And the first version of the app was only a joke weather app and had some funny visuals and stuff.
00:09:01 ◼ ► And it was actually the launch of the Apple Watch a month later that started me down the path of taking it from a joke app to a real professional, like weather app that people would actually want to use to check the weather.
00:09:20 ◼ ► And I find it very funny that it was such a lark almost, really, as as an example right now.
00:09:27 ◼ ► And you're one of the odd things you and I have never met in person, but we were local.
00:09:43 ◼ ► Right now it is 65 and it's been raining all day and carrot weather says, don't worry, the rain will wash away the evidence.
00:09:51 ◼ ► And that is very, it's a perfectly typical carrot snark, at least for my personality setting for the weather every day.
00:10:02 ◼ ► Here, let me take a break right now and thank our first sponsor and then we'll keep going.
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00:10:59 ◼ ► I don't think he's personally planting all the lemon trees, but still, it's kind of cool.
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00:14:18 ◼ ► Yeah, the actual voice is just the Apple's speech synthesizer engine that's in the built-in
00:14:39 ◼ ► And I think that that makes it so I'm able to have, like, literally thousands of lines of
00:14:51 ◼ ► And one of the things that I like the best, I've been about, like, five or six years now,
00:15:01 ◼ ► So if some big thing happens in pop culture or politics or stuff like that, I can have a
00:15:09 ◼ ► It's funny that, like, I get a lot of emails and tweets and stuff like that from people who
00:15:21 ◼ ► That's, it's definitely, I don't know if I've ever discovered that somebody died, but I've
00:15:26 ◼ ► definitely seen references to when the news was still, hey, did you hear about so-and-so
00:15:35 ◼ ► One of the other preferences in there is a political slider where you can shift your political
00:15:40 ◼ ► humor leaning or your personal feeling from liberal to conservative or, I don't know, is
00:15:49 ◼ ► Yeah, there's a centrist, and then there's apolitical if you don't want to hear any political stuff.
00:16:15 ◼ ► Well, I simplify it a little bit and have basically just dialogue for conservative and centrist and
00:16:40 ◼ ► I can't imagine having a version of Daring Fireball with its slider, like even just a two-way slider, left-right, and have a version that pleases everybody.
00:16:51 ◼ ► Yeah, it's tough sometimes, especially when crazy stuff happens on one particular side of the spectrum.
00:17:01 ◼ ► But, yeah, I think it's fun being able to figure out how to write in different voices and stuff like that.
00:17:44 ◼ ► I'm not the kind of developer that sits around and tries to figure out the best way to tune each individual screen to get the most revenue out of people.
00:18:40 ◼ ► Instead of like a screenshot of his monitor, he sent me like a photo that he took of his monitor.
00:19:25 ◼ ► Even in that era, it was known that he was like a celebrity Mac user who evangelized the platform to his enormous listener base.
00:19:45 ◼ ► I haven't had any analytics installed on Daring Fireball in I think it's close to five years.
00:19:50 ◼ ► I forget when I turned off Google Analytics, but I want to say it was around 2020, like around the beginning of COVID.
00:19:59 ◼ ► I was like, this does not seem tenable anymore to have an analytics package on every page.
00:20:18 ◼ ► I didn't check it very frequently, but every once in a while, I would check it if sometimes I'd...
00:20:25 ◼ ► Sometimes I'll get sponsors who want to know some demographics, like even just like country by country.
00:20:44 ◼ ► And outside North America, it's like United Kingdom and then distant third, I think, is Germany.
00:21:05 ◼ ► So I can look at Cloudflare stats for just general, hey, am I getting about the same amount of traffic as I usually do?
00:21:22 ◼ ► And sometimes when I'm dealing with sponsors, most of my sponsors know exactly what I do.
00:21:30 ◼ ► But sometimes it's a bigger company and it's like somebody inside the company is like, we should sponsor this obscure website that's mostly about Apple that has a good tech base.
00:21:43 ◼ ► And the marketing people completely have no idea who I am, what I do, have never heard of it.
00:22:05 ◼ ► But it's basically trying to not sound like I'm scamming them, which is what it sounds like.
00:22:15 ◼ ► But when it comes to weather apps in particular, it's sort of a, I was going to say goldmine, but goldmines are good, but like a goldmine for people who want to do nefarious things with personal information.
00:22:31 ◼ ► Because the one thing that's true about almost everybody's weather apps is that they have location permissions turned on, right, amongst other things.
00:22:42 ◼ ► Because, of course, you want the most natural setting for where you want the weather for is wherever you're standing right now with your phone in your hand.
00:22:50 ◼ ► Right. And having, like, precise tracking turned off isn't useful because that's, like, that could be anywhere from 1 to 20 kilometers from your actual location.
00:23:01 ◼ ► So you actually need to have, and that wouldn't work for, like, weather alert, government weather alerts, or rain notifications.
00:23:14 ◼ ► Right. And so it is the least private, but it is the most useful and is sort of inherent to using the app.
00:23:22 ◼ ► And, again, I even sent you a text message a couple minutes before we were scheduled to start.
00:23:26 ◼ ► We were scheduled to start here at 2.00 in the afternoon, and at 1.50, Carrot sent me an alert that the rain here is going to stop at 2.01.
00:23:35 ◼ ► But Carrot has those sort of exact location-based precipitation alerts that I think fairly are described as initially an innovation from the late, great dark sky that Apple ended up acquiring and turning into Apple weather in some way.
00:23:52 ◼ ► So do you get, do you have to field a lot, given the popularity of Carrot Weather, do you field a lot of inquiries from marketers who are looking either to acquire the app or partner with you, or would you put our SDK in your app, blah, blah, blah?
00:24:07 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, I get a lot of outreach in all those different buckets that you just mentioned.
00:24:13 ◼ ► There are a lot of those location-tracking companies out there that are looking to harvest that data and then sell it on to other people, and they offer a lot of money that I don't want.
00:24:29 ◼ ► Because I just think that's not the kind of thing that I would want in a weather app that I use, and so I'm not going to do that to any of my users.
00:24:36 ◼ ► All of that location data can be used in such creepy ways beyond just like selling you stuff, and I don't want any part of that, especially as things get crazier and crazier in the world, and they find more and more ways to use that kind of stuff against people.
00:24:54 ◼ ► I definitely don't think that's the kind of thing that you should have to be worrying about in the apps that you use on a daily basis.
00:25:06 ◼ ► It's data that's not linked to you, so you don't have any indication of who I am or what it is, but purchases for in-app purchases, subscription, obviously that needs to be connected to the person, location, precise location, identifiers, and usage data for product integration.
00:25:24 ◼ ► But it's not linked to me, so you can't say, oh, I know exactly which settings John Gruber is using or anything like that.
00:25:30 ◼ ► Right, and the only stuff that I store on my servers is if you have notifications turned on, and then I have to save stuff like your location and your push notification ID and that kind of stuff.
00:25:49 ◼ ► And all the requests to all the different weather data API providers that I have, those are anonymized to a degree so that Apple Weather, for example, doesn't know that, not that Apple is going to do anything with your location data,
00:26:05 ◼ ► but to use them as an example, they're not going to know your exact apartment in your apartment building, and then that same person went to the grocery store down the street and then went to whatever.
00:26:20 ◼ ► I have that all anonymized, and then it's all going through my own intermediary server so that your IP address isn't being sent.
00:26:38 ◼ ► And then when did it occur to you that, oh, this is a privacy minefield, a minefield that you can navigate, but that privacy is uniquely endemic to the weather app category?
00:26:52 ◼ ► I think it was when Carrot Weather first launched, it had the biggest launch that I had had to that point.
00:27:03 ◼ ► But like all apps, when Carrot Weather first launched, it was a paid up front only app.
00:27:10 ◼ ► And so all my other apps, you get that big launch, and then it slowly tails off, and people forget about it because it's not being featured on the App Store, and people aren't talking about it in the press.
00:27:23 ◼ ► But then a month later, the Apple Watch came out, and with the Apple Watch, I had to focus a lot less on making a really funny app because the screen is so small, I don't have room for funny visuals or lots of room for jokes.
00:27:39 ◼ ► And especially on the watch face with the complications, you only have room for a data point for the temperature and an image of the weather condition.
00:27:48 ◼ ► And so I had to focus much more on making a really good weather app, and then because the complications on the watch face update throughout the day, I had to, instead of having it be paid up front only, I had to introduce a subscription.
00:28:06 ◼ ► Because each weather data update that I do costs like a small, a very small amount of money, like one thousandth of a penny or something like that.
00:28:16 ◼ ► And so if it's updating constantly throughout the day, every day automatically, eventually it's going to get to the point where it's going to cost me more than you paid for the original app.
00:28:29 ◼ ► And so I was basically forced to start a subscription for people using the watch face complications.
00:28:36 ◼ ► And as a little bonus feature, I just thought it'd be fun to have an option, be able to like flip a switch in the iPhone app and have a different, instead of just the weather, just the temperature and the weather condition, you could have a second complication on your watch face that showed the wind speed.
00:29:01 ◼ ► And that customization, it led to like a flurry of requests from people asking for like different data points.
00:29:14 ◼ ► And that was really just like the genesis of that becoming more than just like a joke weather app and, and having all the, these customization features that it now has.
00:29:28 ◼ ► And when, when I started to feel like this was more than just like a joke app, like I could focus on this full time and I'd never run out of stuff, new stuff to add.
00:29:48 ◼ ► Carrot is one of them that I rotate between regularly and oftentimes somebody else, some app major update.
00:29:57 ◼ ► And I enjoy, I continue to, and it's just as a user interface critic slash practitioner at times throughout my life, I find it fascinating how many approaches to presenting weather info information there are like it's so many different ways.
00:30:19 ◼ ► And yeah, it's really one of the most personal kinds of apps that you can have because I mean, everybody cares about the temperature, but tons of people care about the feels like temperature.
00:30:37 ◼ ► Are you going to have it focus on like visuals, like the current weather conditions outside?
00:30:57 ◼ ► And so there's just so many different ways to do a weather app and so many different use personal use cases and other apps like like calendar apps or photo apps.
00:31:17 ◼ ► I mean, you know, I don't want to start naming good competitors, but but I think one of the things that separates carrot from the rest of its competition is that right out of the box.
00:31:29 ◼ ► Like if somebody is listening to this episode and they're like, OK, I've heard a carrot over the time.
00:31:56 ◼ ► I think everybody would look at carrot right out of the box factory default experience and say this is a very carefully designed presentation of the weather.
00:32:06 ◼ ► But it's also like a weather app construction kit, right, where you've got themes and theming options for customization where, like I said, it's like it's like getting a prebuilt Lego kit and it's already snapped together and it's in a certain way.
00:32:27 ◼ ► But you could take the pieces apart and kind of make your own weather app out of it and or choose from other preset themes for the presentation of it.
00:32:36 ◼ ► Like one of the things I was going for with that was there's Nintendo makes a version of Mario called Mario Maker.
00:32:48 ◼ ► And so that was one of the the ideas that I had going into making this version of carrot that has this whole build your own layout thing.
00:32:57 ◼ ► And it was this feeling that I got when I first launched the Apple Watch app was that there's just so many different ways to go.
00:33:04 ◼ ► And this was like my holy grail of I would love to have an app where you can make your own weather app that is perfect for you.
00:33:20 ◼ ► I'm sure, you know, like everything, you know, that appeals to power or any kind of app that scales from casual to power users.
00:33:36 ◼ ► There's some kind of long tail graph of how far into the customization X percent of carrot users get.
00:33:54 ◼ ► But James Thompson's P Calc, the calculator app, which is, again, you just if you just download it and launch it, you get a really cool looking calculator app for iPhone or for Mac.
00:34:09 ◼ ► And if you want to make your own and customize like the layout of the buttons in your calculator, it's all there for you to play with.
00:34:20 ◼ ► It's like why I write about this stuff is that sort of approach to making software where it's it's not just throwing the Lego pieces at the user and giving them an instruction.
00:34:35 ◼ ► And now before you get anything useful, you have to build something yourself, which is a good way.
00:34:45 ◼ ► I mean, arguably something even like Xcode is like that, right, like where you don't really get like there's default projects.
00:34:54 ◼ ► But I love the idea of an app that sort of has a good default presentation and usefulness, but that is customizable out the wazoo for the sort of user who has their own itch to scratch.
00:35:18 ◼ ► And especially when there's stuff like a big redesign, like with iOS 26, having to go through and and handle each of the different like sections and the different designs for each section and then making sure they all work together perfectly.
00:35:49 ◼ ► So if Carrot Weather is 10 years old, I presume then the original version was UIKit entirely.
00:36:45 ◼ ► Because I know my friend Gus Mueller of Flying Meat fame is still largely Acorn and RetroBatch, the image editing apps for Mac.
00:37:12 ◼ ► I know famously for podcast listeners, Marco Arment spent a lot of time rewriting Overcast in Swift and Swift UI over the last few years.
00:37:23 ◼ ► Yeah, that's my thing is I have basically zero interest in rewriting something I've already done.
00:37:31 ◼ ► I think for a lot of programmers that is fun, like refactoring stuff to make it more efficient and make it better.
00:37:44 ◼ ► Like I've tried that before with Android and I just get sick of it after a few weeks just because it's doing something that I've already done just isn't exciting to me.
00:37:56 ◼ ► And so having to do that for Swift, I mean, there's there's definitely benefits to it, but it's just redoing stuff that I've already done.
00:38:09 ◼ ► And but I mean, I do have plenty of Swift code in places where I basically have to use it and Swift UI in places where I have to use it.
00:38:17 ◼ ► Like the Apple Watch app is entirely Swift UI because it has to be now and widgets and live activities.
00:38:26 ◼ ► And so I'm comfortable enough with it now where I definitely if I was going to do a new app, I could do it in Swift and Swift UI.
00:38:35 ◼ ► But in terms of the stuff that's already written until I have to do it, I think I'm probably going to keep it an objective say.
00:39:05 ◼ ► You could have told me I've starting around 2022, I rewrote the whole thing in Swift or no.
00:39:11 ◼ ► Like you said, like the large parts of it that were written in UIKit and Objective-C are still UIKit and Objective-C.
00:39:23 ◼ ► Earlier versions of Carrot Weather that didn't look like really native iOS apps, they had more of like a game design to them.
00:39:36 ◼ ► But definitely the current version of Carrot Weather really looks like a native iOS app.
00:39:59 ◼ ► And I didn't have any significant issues with legibility or anything like that in the app.
00:40:10 ◼ ► Yeah, I have to say, and it's not out of beta yet, and probably won't be by the time this episode drops.
00:40:20 ◼ ► But iOS 26.1, the second-to-last developer beta, introduced a preference, not hidden in accessibility, but right in settings display, liquid glass, between clear and tinted.
00:40:37 ◼ ► And it's funny, I find it funny because so many people clearly want that tinted preference.
00:40:45 ◼ ► And I tried it for a full week, and now I'm back on clear, and I think I like the default clear better, even though I'm certainly not one to hold my tongue regarding disliking Apple design directions.
00:41:11 ◼ ► And when I went back, like during development season, when I'd go back to my device that was still on iOS 18, it just felt dated by that point.
00:41:36 ◼ ► And I know I had Louis Manchin on the show a couple weeks ago or mid-summer, and we, especially Louis, but we both kind of vented about what we didn't like about liquid glass overall, especially on the Mac.
00:41:58 ◼ ► And I feel like a lot of the stuff that there is to dislike is such low-hanging fruit and is sort of like, how can anybody at Apple not see this?
00:42:14 ◼ ► And I think that the great flattening of iOS 7 11 years ago was way too flat and kept everything, kept the third dimension out of the UI too much for too long.
00:42:29 ◼ ► And I think it's not just that this is new and iOS 18 is old and the old always kind of looks stale.
00:42:40 ◼ ► And it does the flatness going back to iOS 18, which I still have on my last year's iPhone.
00:42:47 ◼ ► I still, for comparison's sake, I've got new iPhones running iOS 26 and my year-old iPhone still running iOS 18.7, whatever.
00:43:01 ◼ ► It just looks what I've always felt in my gut that they weren't trying hard enough, right?
00:43:07 ◼ ► That this is, that they're just, that Apple is so full of talented UI designers and artists.
00:43:15 ◼ ► And so, why are they seemingly making these user interfaces with one arm tied behind their back?
00:43:24 ◼ ► And I imagine that a lot of these low-hanging fruit are going to be worked on over the course of the year.
00:43:40 ◼ ► And we're going to look back at this as just like the beginning of a change in the iOS design line.
00:43:50 ◼ ► And so, basically, though, you didn't think it was, you didn't find it too hard to update Carrot for iOS 26.
00:44:02 ◼ ► I thought that it was just going to be like change the tab bar, change the nav bar in the code, and I was basically going to be done.
00:44:10 ◼ ► But there was a lot of work just because of all the different customization that you can do in Carrot.
00:44:16 ◼ ► And so, there were just so many different – I had to touch basically every single screen in the whole app and every single view.
00:44:28 ◼ ► There wasn't anything where I was like stuck on the design and like, how do I make this look good?
00:44:36 ◼ ► Do you think that's part of the – how much of that is just the nature of Apple moving its own platforms forward versus the almost never-ending well of just weather apps in general?
00:44:52 ◼ ► Even if Apple stopped moving their platforms forward, there's so much you can still do with the weather app as a genre.
00:44:58 ◼ ► But how much does Apple moving the platforms forward just sort of – okay, you've got this hit app.
00:45:06 ◼ ► It is the app, the subscriptions for which are running the business that is your career.
00:45:13 ◼ ► And just keeping up with the way the platforms change and evolve takes you a year before it's next year and now there's a whole new setup of APIs or even platforms, right?
00:45:30 ◼ ► Yeah, there's a vision app and a Mac app and a CarPlay app and – yeah, I'm on all the different Apple platforms.
00:45:39 ◼ ► And even that might be getting – stretching the limits of a one-person development shop, right?
00:45:50 ◼ ► Yeah, I get requests to do that and update what I have, but that's definitely outside of my ability to keep up with doing a completely separate platform and a different language and different design language and all that kind of stuff.
00:46:09 ◼ ► And how much do you think that by being – embracing the native APIs has set you up to be able to adopt Apple's new stuff on a regular basis, right?
00:46:24 ◼ ► Because I think that's the thing that gets lost amongst non-developer laypeople when the discussion comes up about users preferring or like critical users and reviewers like me advocating for truly native apps for the Apple platform.
00:46:50 ◼ ► There's practical benefits to it on an ongoing basis where if you're a devoted Carrot user, you end up with things like a Vision OS app pretty early on or support for live activities or something like that early on.
00:47:14 ◼ ► I think it helps a tremendous amount because if I had to – if I was using some other like intermediate platform, you'd have to just wait around for them to update all their stuff to work with the new stuff.
00:47:28 ◼ ► And one of the things that I think has made Carrot so successful is that I do embrace the new stuff as soon as it comes out.
00:47:37 ◼ ► Like every – like all my users can rely every year, launch day of the new operating system to have all of that stuff integrated into Carrot and have all the cool new features built into the app.
00:47:52 ◼ ► And it's just a lot of fun for me to work on the new stuff over the summer and find fun and interesting ways to put it into the app.
00:48:11 ◼ ► That the overall user base, the slice of the user base of iPhone users who might consider a paid subscription to a weather app is relatively small compared to the billion-plus total iPhone users.
00:48:27 ◼ ► But even just a few percent of a billion users is a potential audience of a lot of people, right?
00:48:33 ◼ ► And in that group, you're hitting the sort of people who want things like – who are aware.
00:48:40 ◼ ► I mean like in the general world, there's a lot of iPhone users who don't even know what a live activity is.
00:48:46 ◼ ► Even if they have them on their phone because they have an app that supports it, they don't know what it is.
00:48:58 ◼ ► But then there's the sort of nerdy users who might be listening to this show who are like, yeah, as soon as Apple announced that at WWDC, I couldn't wait to have it on my iPhone.
00:49:08 ◼ ► And it's perfect for a weather app because I live somewhere where we get – it's not Cupertino where it's 72 and sunny every day.
00:49:17 ◼ ► Yeah, I think that there's definitely two big user bases there and finding ways to get those users who aren't in on all the latest marketing terms, finding ways to surface those features for them and explain them in a way that makes sense without using those marketing terms and expect them to know what they are.
00:49:44 ◼ ► It's a tricky path to figure out, especially with the new releases and being there on day one and not having examples to like crib off of.
00:49:57 ◼ ► That's always been one of the exciting things for me to go off on a tangent is like making the Vision OS app or the Apple Watch app back in 2015 and not having examples to go off of and basically having to figure it all out for myself.
00:50:12 ◼ ► And not having anybody like in my company to talk to, to talk this stuff through with and say, is this a good idea or am I making a dumb decision?
00:50:21 ◼ ► That's always been like a frustrating thing, but also like a fun thing at the same time for me.
00:50:29 ◼ ► One of the other things that characterizes the weather app category is that there is a tremendous amount of competition.
00:50:55 ◼ ► But for the most part, they're apps that tell you the weather, where you are or at a list of saved locations.
00:51:04 ◼ ► Do you how much of an advantage do you think it is, though, that a lot of the ones and I was just as we record this carrot is number 10 in the weather app category, which is pretty good, I think, for a paid app.
00:52:20 ◼ ► are ugly and cross-platform and don't support, aren't quick to adopt new features for the
00:52:40 ◼ ► I was able to figure out a way to make a decent-looking weather app and code it, and that it has all
00:52:54 ◼ ► I'm surprised that such ugly apps can be so popular still, but I guess there's a lot of
00:53:22 ◼ ► Let's just put everything else aside and just look at what he's done with the Oval Office.
00:53:37 ◼ ► Whereas, I'll bet, again, just to go the other way, I don't think Joe Biden had a particular
00:53:42 ◼ ► He just sort of, yeah, I want an Oval Office that looks like the Oval Office, you know what
00:54:11 ◼ ► I thought it was amazing getting to see it, and I'm so glad I got to see it before what
00:54:48 ◼ ► It is a little strange being there, and it's just crazy and amazing how much history is
00:54:55 ◼ ► in there and how cool it is to, like, it almost feels like you're stepping onto a movie set.
00:55:04 ◼ ► I've taken, when I was a kid, like, in junior, yeah, I guess junior high, we had a field
00:55:09 ◼ ► trip, like a multi-day field trip to Washington, D.C., and we took a White House tour, but when
00:55:14 ◼ ► the kids come through in the middle of a weekday, you don't typically get to see the Oval Office.
00:55:20 ◼ ► I think we mostly were in the East Wing, R.I.P., and I think the good news about Trump's modifications
00:55:28 ◼ ► to the Oval Office is that they're just held up on the wall with Elmer's glue, so I don't
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00:58:03 ◼ ► So we left off there talking, Brian, talking about third-party weather competitors in the
00:58:14 ◼ ► The other gorilla, the 800-pound gorilla in the room, though, is that you're competing against
00:58:21 ◼ ► And I think at this point, I was thinking about it in preparation for interviewing you for the
00:58:26 ◼ ► show, I'm trying to think of popular third-party apps that don't have a competitor from Apple,
00:58:38 ◼ ► Like, the truth is that as time has gone on, you know, and I'm old enough, I remember like
00:58:45 ◼ ► in the classic Mac era of the 90s, Apple hardly made any apps at all, and the default Mac system
00:59:02 ◼ ► But it left Apple in a position where effectively their pants were kind of down, where they didn't
00:59:18 ◼ ► Now, and Claris is a subsidiary of Apple, but emailer didn't start as a Claris product.
00:59:24 ◼ ► It was an acquisition, and then they just were like, we're just going to stick it on all new
00:59:28 ◼ ► Because it got to the point where it was absurd to be selling a computer that didn't have an
00:59:34 ◼ ► Somehow, you fast forward from, oh my God, now there's an email client built into the Mac?
01:00:01 ◼ ► So how do you see that relationship between you as a third-party carrot app developer and
01:00:15 ◼ ► I've talked to the developers at Apple who work on the weather app, and I do think that
01:00:21 ◼ ► they've done a great job of making a good starter weather app that millions or billions of users
01:00:37 ◼ ► But when they first announced it, I was a little bit worried, but it hasn't ended up being a problem.
01:00:52 ◼ ► And I think that having stock Apple apps that are good enough for a lot of people, but then I think it drives people to find apps that are better or at least better for certain use cases to the app store to find something better that works for them.
01:01:12 ◼ ► And the other thing that's sort of unique to Apple and weather is Apple's acquisition of dark sky.
01:01:20 ◼ ► I forget how many years ago now at this point, but turning that acquisition into a built-in set of weather APIs, which carrot can optionally use.
01:01:31 ◼ ► I mean, I'm not sure there is a third-party weather app that doesn't at least offer it.
01:02:03 ◼ ► And then you can optionally upgrade to use – I've lost track of how many weather data providers I have in the app now, but there's –
01:02:14 ◼ ► Forica, Apple Weather, AccuWeather, Tomorrow.io, XWeather, which I've never heard of, and OpenWeather.
01:02:43 ◼ ► I imagine it's because so many developers rely – they knew that so many developers relied on Dark Sky, and I think that they wanted to have – by buying a weather data API, they wanted to be able to offer that to developers of the platform.
01:03:01 ◼ ► It's not free of charge for developers to use, but you can pay for it, and it has a bunch of great use cases for developers on the platform outside of just making a weather app.
01:03:19 ◼ ► They get an API that they can build into their app that they can control, and they don't have to worry about another third-party weather data provider, just like they didn't have to worry about another Maps provider once they stood up on the map.
01:03:32 ◼ ► And then they can also offer that same data to developers so that they can make great apps out of it.
01:03:45 ◼ ► And again, my general theory of how Apple operates is that Apple's priorities are Apple first, users second, developers third.
01:03:54 ◼ ► And they do care about all three, but that's the order, and that order isn't going to change.
01:03:59 ◼ ► And I kind of feel like the dark sky acquisition and turning it into an Apple weather API service fits that perfectly, where it's Apple first, where they absolutely need a pretty good weather app built in to the system and didn't want to be beholden to anybody else anywhere in the world.
01:04:25 ◼ ► And Maps – weather never got to a problematic state like Maps did at the crisis point where Apple felt like they needed to launch Apple Maps in 2011, I think.
01:04:44 ◼ ► So that's why Scott Forstall got forced out, not just because of weather, but because of the personality clash behind all of that.
01:04:54 ◼ ► But that Apple – Google had them by the short hairs, where the license that Apple had for Google Maps didn't involve vector map tiles.
01:05:08 ◼ ► And it didn't involve, crucially, turn-by-turn directions, which at this point, it seems ridiculous.
01:05:15 ◼ ► It's like talking about the fact that the original iPhone in 2007, the camera didn't even shoot video.
01:05:47 ◼ ► And so to get all that from Google, Google was asking for way more information about users' location.
01:05:54 ◼ ► And they're having them sign into their Google account so they could track them that Apple was comfortable giving.
01:06:06 ◼ ► And I think that before weather could ever become a crisis situation like that, they were like, we've got the money.
01:06:16 ◼ ► But then from a user's perspective, I think it was the benefit of by offering it to developers, there would be.
01:06:25 ◼ ► And I think there are a lot of – probably most, if we actually dissected them, most of the weather apps available for iOS, I think if you explained what they do privacy-wise for the user – and, yes, they agree to it.
01:06:44 ◼ ► But the way that those apps will sell or let – do sort of squishy, make you feel a little gross marketing things with the data from the user, I think would make people very surprised to find out that all these weather apps are like that.
01:07:03 ◼ ► But at least with Apple Weather as a Service, there's an option for developers to make an app that doesn't impede upon users' privacy at all.
01:07:17 ◼ ► And like you said, it's there for – like if you have a calendar app or something like that, you could integrate with Apple Weather.
01:07:24 ◼ ► It's not a weather app first, but you could show the daily weather with a couple of calls to the weather APIs.
01:07:30 ◼ ► And it's right there, and you don't have to build in a third-party SDK that might be expensive and it might be privacy-invasive.
01:07:38 ◼ ► Yeah, I don't know what the internal discussions were around it, but I've always just gotten the sense that if Apple is going to make something themselves and make it available on the platform,
01:07:52 ◼ ► they're not going to just hold it back from developers just for fun and to keep it to themselves.
01:07:57 ◼ ► And so I was always hopeful that if they were going to turn the Dark Sky API into an Apple API, that they would then offer that to developers as well.
01:08:39 ◼ ► But one of the reasons I like using multiple weather apps is I like getting different forecasts if I'm flipping around, if there is weather going on.
01:08:48 ◼ ► But do you get the Dark Sky-style precipitation alerts through all the services or are those you need to Apple?
01:08:59 ◼ ► So I am doing something similar to what Dark Sky did with taking multiple frames of radar data and then extrapolating out where the motion fields are.
01:09:13 ◼ ► And then using that to basically fast-forward the radar and get an idea of the next hour's rainfall for a particular location and then send that all out via notifications so you can get a notification when it's going to start or stop raining.
01:09:29 ◼ ► And also, I have now the live activities that can auto-start and stay on your lock screen with a rain chart, which I think is much more useful than it.
01:09:40 ◼ ► And as you know, being local, it's been sort of a rainy, crappy week, and it's been spot on.
01:09:46 ◼ ► And I've been paying, knowing that I wanted to have you on the show, I've been paying attention.
01:09:51 ◼ ► And last night, it was like, I remember I was in the living room with my wife, and it said, rain's going to start in 10 minutes.
01:10:00 ◼ ► Kind of a, it's one of those little things, like when Dark Sky first started doing it, it was like, holy shit, this is amazing, right?
01:10:20 ◼ ► And people love to complain about, it's just sort of a trope, long lines at the post office.
01:10:39 ◼ ► And right down to the fact that these alerts that Dark Sky kind of pioneered for like, very, very local to your specific location, precipitation alerts, are, it's sort of like table stakes at this point.
01:10:59 ◼ ► They're like, I only really took notice of the one last night because I knew I was going to have you on the show today.
01:11:05 ◼ ► And I was like, oh, I should remember this and tell them that it nailed it to the minute.
01:11:28 ◼ ► And looking at the phones that we have today and all the stuff that we have today, like ChatGPT and Apple Watch and the Vision headset, you wouldn't be able to imagine that back then.
01:11:47 ◼ ► One of the questions I have for you is one of the ways that I feel like Carrot, the whole idea, the gimmick, and again, I don't mean gimmick to be diminishing.
01:11:56 ◼ ► I think you've carved out this very unique brand for Carrot Weather that is a huge part of its success.
01:12:13 ◼ ► But the idea of it being driven by a sentient AI 10 years ago was very far, seemed far-fetched.
01:12:26 ◼ ► And while the voice, and again, I kind of always thought you were using Apple's default female robot-ish voice because it sounded familiar.
01:12:53 ◼ ► And it actually, I don't think you would get anything nearly as funny as the Carrot UI.
01:13:13 ◼ ► I mean, I've tried to get ChatGPT to write jokes for Carrot just to give me more breadth.
01:13:29 ◼ ► But if one thing that I've built into the app is the ability to chat with Carrot via ChatGPT.
01:13:37 ◼ ► And every once in a while, when you're talking, and so I give it instructions to talk basically like a snarky weather robot.
01:13:47 ◼ ► And every once in a while, when you're having a conversation with it, it will come up with something funny and actually feel really like the Carrot character.
01:14:00 ◼ ► So I think in a few years, it would basically be able to write stuff that is indistinguishable from me and be able to do a lot of that work for me.
01:14:24 ◼ ► I think one of the ways that it has helped me with that is being able to give me ideas like every once in a while, I'll be like, like one of the things for writing comedy is like a rules of three and having a list of three funny thing or a list of three things.
01:14:59 ◼ ► Yeah, there was always a there was always a certain pattern to the Dave Letterman top 10 lists.
01:15:08 ◼ ► It was sort of like because the band start as soon as he says number one, the band starts playing and they can't hear commercial.
01:15:29 ◼ ► The third item in the list needs to be the funny one, because if you don't want to if you make it number one, then it's the rest of them.
01:15:56 ◼ ► Or do you think that because you came at the right time and it's already established, it's actually sort of bolstering it?
01:16:18 ◼ ► I'm not I don't think I'm to that or that they'll be confused or even that they won't get it.
01:16:23 ◼ ► That new users are going to be like they might rather than just assume that it's a joke, they might think it actually is A.I., which I guess doesn't matter if they actually think it is A.I.
01:16:34 ◼ ► Yeah, I think it's obviously funny enough that it isn't and it's obviously over the top in terms of it being like she wants to like kill everybody and all that kind of stuff.
01:17:02 ◼ ► actually is a bit more open with with its plan with ChatGPT being more open with its plans.
01:17:08 ◼ ► Actual ChatGPT personality, which to me has informed the personalities of all its competitors, is this obsequious deferential approach to humanity.
01:17:27 ◼ ► It's just like what I was talking about with when I first created Carrot back in 2013 with all the apps being so over the top deferential and and positive and all that kind of stuff.
01:17:56 ◼ ► And so instead having this personality that the core of the Carrot personality is I would define it as a very comfortable in its complete sense of superiority to the human race.
01:18:15 ◼ ► It's sort of its perspective is is sort of mild resentment at living a life of being forced to address these.
01:18:25 ◼ ► Ant like intelligence meatbags who are holding these cell phones, asking for the weather and sort of looking forward to our demise, which all things considered, we're probably closer to than we were when Carrot started 10 years ago.
01:18:43 ◼ ► To be honest, yes, it's been a good, good 10 years for carrots personality, which sadly doesn't actually exist.
01:18:54 ◼ ► Well, you mentioned the phrase, last but not least, I want to mention this because it is you mentioned the phrase over the top.
01:19:00 ◼ ► And I can't think of anything you've ever done with Carrot weather or Carrot anything that is more over the top than launching a musical.
01:19:14 ◼ ► Which again, if you, I'm sure a lot of people out there are Carrot users who are listening and they know exactly what I'm talking about, but then there's a lot who either aren't or are irregular Carrot users.
01:19:25 ◼ ► And I mean, and I mean it, you've commissioned an entire musical that is unlocked song by song as you use Carrot weather.
01:19:35 ◼ ► Yeah, it was this crazy thing that I was just playing around with different ideas and it was actually an AI thing that I was playing around with.
01:19:50 ◼ ► And I was just playing around with it thinking, oh, it'd be fun to have a song from Carrot in there.
01:19:57 ◼ ► And just completely by accident, I put something in and it sounded like a Broadway musical.
01:20:03 ◼ ► And I was like, oh my God, this would be amazing to do like an entire Broadway musical in the app with a bunch of songs written or done by Carrot, the character.
01:20:31 ◼ ► No, it, the, the actual, the lyrics and everything are written by me, but the, the actual singing is done by AI.
01:20:50 ◼ ► And just to, and just to let people know, like song one on the soundtrack is titled, what the F is this?
01:21:04 ◼ ► And so it's just been a ton of fun and it's just, it's the kind of thing that I think AI is perfect for being able to do things that you would never, ever be able to do.
01:21:30 ◼ ► I would never be able to do hire a bunch of singers and musicians and that kind of stuff.
01:21:41 ◼ ► I don't know about that, but maybe, but yeah, it's, so it's not like using AI to produce this musical 15 song musical for Carrot was taking money or business away from Broadway style musical performers and conductors and musicians.
01:22:06 ◼ ► And meanwhile, now there's this incredibly fun and funny things in the middle of, of an already funny weather app.
01:22:16 ◼ ► And I have to admit when it first prompted me with an alert for it, I guess a couple of weeks ago, it coincides, it seemed to have launched with the iOS 26 version.
01:22:27 ◼ ► Or is that just, I really thought, well, what is it really going to be when I tap this?
01:22:59 ◼ ► And I was like, this is the dumbest thing I've ever done, but that's when I knew that I should do it.
01:23:05 ◼ ► And the other thing I'm sad to report or perhaps unsurprisingly, so carrot has often as long had a series of quote unquote missions.
01:23:59 ◼ ► And it has a bunch of, when you actually find the location, it has a mock encyclopedia entry written by Carrot that has like a bunch of like funny stuff in it.
01:24:11 ◼ ► Speaking of being ahead of your time, now we have an entire encyclopedia written by an evil sentient AI construct.
01:24:37 ◼ ► So I don't feel that it is too surprising to find out that it is the sole focus of your career at this point.
01:24:49 ◼ ► But it's fantastic that it's been going strong and still going as strong as ever 10 years in, which is great.
01:24:55 ◼ ► It's truly, you and Carrot are truly, really, an indie development success story that I worry are getting fewer and far further between.
01:25:32 ◼ ► Like when I first came out with Carrot to Do, I thought I'd be able to work on this for a month or two or something like that.
01:25:40 ◼ ► And I've just always been worried that the other shoe is going to drop and I'm going to have to go back to a real job.
01:25:46 ◼ ► But it's now been 12 years since that first app launched and 10 years of Carrot Weather.
01:26:00 ◼ ► Well, and it just seems, talking to you here on the show and just observing from afar, just from the release notes, it just seems like very fulfilling, fun work for you.
01:26:25 ◼ ► I think that I've just always tried to make the app that I want to use and I don't chase trends and do stuff for users.
01:26:56 ◼ ► Or you can just turn off the personality and Carrot and use it as a regular weather app.
01:27:07 ◼ ► I probably are some people who really love it that way, but I kind of feel like they're missing out.