Bringing CARROT Weather to Apple Watch

[Background music]Greetings meatbag, I, Carrot, am your new weather robot.

I'm Brian Mueller and I'm the creator and developer of the Carrot series of apps. It's a beautiful sunny day, ha-ha, just kidding, it's raining. I was planning on being a screenwriter, I actually met who would later become my wife and I decided to stay here.

I found a way to get the writing into the app in a way that makes the apps really unique. So Carrot weather is a bit different from the other four apps, she takes different weather conditions and tailors jokes to them.

As reward for good behavior, I have generated a sunny day for you. I was basically just an English major and I had no experience with coding. What I did was just grab a book on coding, thinking I'd just flip through it and learn like the vocabulary, and then I'd go and hire a programmer to help me build these apps. It wasn't anywhere near as over my head as I thought it was going to be. So I just start building different pieces of different apps.

It went a lot better than I expected. Carrot weather started on the iPhone, but the cool thing about it is, it being a weather app, I could expand it to a bunch of different platforms. So I started with the Apple Watch, when that first launched in April of last year, and then over the summer I worked on a Mac version that launched in August. And then in October, I launched the Apple TV version. It was a lot of fun figuring out how to do all these different things that come so naturally to me now, on iOS, and transporting them or miniaturizing them for the Apple Watch.

I tried to use all the hardware features built into the watch as much as possible, to abstract away a lot of, what would normally be visual in the interface on the iPhone.

It was great to have native apps on Apple Watch and also have complications so you could get all the weather data right on your watch face without having to go into the app. I was able to get the complications to show all of the relevant data that you could possibly ask for.

You can see, what's going on right now and also what's going to happen in a few hours. So when I'm jogging I get a new perspective that's where different ideas can sort of bubble to the surface. So the idea for the subscription on Apple Watch was born out of necessity.

Each time the weather app goes and updates its data, that costs a fraction of a cent. That's not a problem with an iPhone app where you're only using it once or twice a day at the most. But with the complication on Apple Watch, that's updating several times an hour, every hour, of every day.

So those costs really start to add up, quickly. What I try to do is make the experience of buying these in-app purchases fun for the user and I want to make it a positive experience for them, and make it feel like, they just made a great decision by buying this feature. I think a lot of developers are scared of adding, in-app purchases to premium apps because they're afraid of how users are going to respond to that. But I think a lot of it is just setting expectations, explaining to users what these in-app purchases are, and why they need to be in-app purchases that are separate from the paid up-front price that they already paid.

I think if you're honest with people, and you explain it well, they're going to be more than happy to pay that fee, if there's a good reason for it.

The Carrot apps are very personal apps, probably the most personal apps that you can own. The Apple Watch is the most personal device that Apple has ever made. I'm Brian Mueller, I'm the creator of the Carrot series of apps and my advice would be to start with something simple and make it really fun and engaging.