My weather app is now a dating sim

Filling up the heart meter gets you gifts. | Image: Carrot

One of Carrot Weather’s main selling points, besides the fact that it’s a genuinely very good app for getting the forecast, is its character. The app has an “AI” that will serve up scalding insults and timely jokes alongside the “feels like” temperature (the only measure that matters, don’t at me). The latest update is taking that experience to a whole new level: according to the app’s developer, Brian Mueller, you’ll be able to “improve your relationship with the homicidal AI” and even “start a ‘romance’ with her.”

You endear yourself to Carrot through “bonding activities,” which will increase the number of hearts you have with the app. Those include “debugging” the app (which involves shaking your phone), “charging its servers,” and talking into your phone about how great the app is. In return for your adoration, Carrot will give you gifts every time you level up your relationship, which go into an inventory system that you can use to manage and even combine them. According to Mueller, the romance option will only be unlocked after you find the right combination of gifts.

Image: Carrot
Yes, one of the mini-games is literally praising the app out loud.

While adding what’s essentially a dating sim to a weather app feels like a novel approach — I’ve never seen it done before — it doesn’t really feel that out-there for Carrot. The app has had other mini-games before, including “missions” to find specific locations on a map and an achievements system. As a Carrot user myself, I’ve found those to be pretty enjoyable, but I’m very excited to try and woo the computer; it always jokes about how it’s the one causing rain or snow, so it couldn’t hurt to be in its good graces.

Image: Carrot Weather
The new layout gallery — the old one basically only showed one layout at a time.

The 5.9 update, out on Tuesday, also brings some improvements for more mundane things like telling the weather. You can add animated wind particles to maps, there’s a new “inline” layout that arranges the UI to focus on vertical charts and extra details, and the layout screen itself has gotten an overhaul to make browsing through premade setups and editing your own custom ones easier. The app’s support for Apple’s Live Activities is also expanding, so you’ll be able to track snow and other types of precipitation from your lock screen in addition to rain, which the app already supported.