APP STORE AWARDS 2021

Apple Watch App of the Year

Carrot Weather’s forecasts deliver a 100 percent chance of fun.

Carrot Weather is our 2021 Apple Watch App of the Year because... it optimizes its best-in-class forecasts (and the sarcastic, slightly sinister character behind it) for your wrist.

‣ Number of Apple Watch complications: 20
‣ Number of years the developer studied app development: 0
‣ Percentage of users who choose “homicidal personality”: > 50

Carrot is a weather app with more personality than you might be used to. After all, most forecasts aren’t delivered by a droll, self-aware robot who encourages stealing candy from babies and routinely brings up scary clowns.

As much as we appreciate the app’s deadpan humor (“I hope you packed some dry underwear”), we love that developer Brian Mueller understands being funny isn’t enough: Carrot is a best-in-class weather app, and his Apple Watch app is a brilliant example.

Let Carrot take over your watch face with one of its many designs (left), or tap right into the app for your daily dose of snark.

Like its iOS and iPadOS counterparts, Carrot on Apple Watch allows so much customization it’s almost like building your own weather app. Choose from 18 different weather-related metrics to accompany Carrot’s signature snark—everything from temperature to pollen count to UV index. (Adjust these options by going to the settings menu in the iOS app and selecting Apple Watch.)

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You can adorn your watch face with any of Carrot’s 20 (!) complications, including hyperlocal forecast, UV index, and humidity. Set “Smart Data Points” that appear only when certain conditions are met, like a specific air-quality index or wind speed. Or keep things simple by choosing one of the four templates in the app’s Gallery.

With the Apple Watch app, I tried to abstract away a lot of what would normally be visual on the iPhone.

—Brian Mueller, Carrot Weather developer

Mueller, the one-man development studio who’s written Carrot’s code and comedy since 2013, says bringing the app to Apple Watch in 2017 was a turning point. “I couldn’t really have long jokes on the watch,” he says, “so I started over from scratch.”

Years of refinement later, Carrot on Apple Watch delivers maximum power in minimal space. Which is why this weather app delivers a 100 percent chance of fun.

2021 App Store Award Winners