For a while now I have been bouncing back and forth between using Dark Sky and Hello Weather as my tools of choice. Then a few months ago, after seeing some new features (at the time) of CARROT Weather, I decided to give the quirky app a try. The thing about CARROT is that the entire aesthetic and tone of the app makes it seem like it’s not a serious app.
However, I’ve found that it is perhaps the best weather app. Allow me to explain why.
Information Density
The make it or break it for any weather app is the information density of the app — a good weather app can convey what’s going in a very detailed manner, very quickly. Whether you are looking at the cute art, the top information, the hourly detail view, or the week overview — CARROT nails information density.
To be clear, there’s nothing CARROT has which other apps don’t have, but the presentation of that same data is vastly better than any other app. It is all logical — it makes sense. Hourly plots should be horizontal. Why? Because that’s how we think about the day, not vertically. Weeks too, because that’s how we think about a week. We are moving through time, not down time — horizontal logically conveys this better.
And that’s the thing — the design itself is logical, but the weird nonsensical cartoons are what seals the deal. They make sense, but only if you just take the mood from them. Honestly I don’t know what the fuck is going on in most of these little cartoons — but they do convey the basics of the weather to me. You take one glance at those for just a moment, and you have a pretty good idea of what is going on — in a way which you can’t quite describe, but that you know. Oh, it’s nice, or it’s cold, or it’s nasty. It clicks.
Here’s a few examples:
It’s instant and that’s hugely important. So while, like I did, it is easy to dismiss the app as a gimmick — it really fucking works.
Customization
The other thing CARROT nails is that different people care about different things — and that’s both personal and geographic. For instance, relative humidity is rather pointless for me in Washington State, but in say Houston — it’s something to know. Barometric readings mean things to some people, and nothing to most people. Carrot allows you to customize what you see and where you see it — and the order in which you see it. Very few apps do this. Couple this with the above and now you can start to really see the power of this app.
Shortcut Integration
CARROT has gone above and beyond to craft Siri Shortcuts, and the Shortcuts app itself in a way where they logically work well with CARROT. There’s a lot of reasons you might want to grab this data via Siri, and CARROT has pretty much every base covered for you. If you are trying to get Siri to spit out your plans and connect them with events on your calendar, this is the app you’ll want to use. It’s verbose, and yet very easy to setup as the settings are inside CARROT and not that mess Apple has created with Shortcuts.
That Snark
I really don’t understand the snark in this app. Most of the time it is utter nonsense. But, it is amazingly relevant and always brings a little smile to my face and those around me. I only have it on for the voice stuff, which means I occasionally am caught off guard and my day made a little better.
It’s weird, but in a good way.
Overall
This is the best weather app on iOS right now. It’s not even close. There’s simply no other weather app which has this information density in such a fast format. And I haven’t even talked about the weather maps, which are outstanding.
Originally I wanted this app to try out some of the new weather layers, which required me to subscribe. Then I was hooked. One of my personal favorites is the Cloud Cover view — that this is all baked into the weather app I normally use is outstanding.
Do yourself a favor, ditch whatever shitty weather app you are using and get CARROT.