The App Store & The Little Weather App That Could
An email I sent to the wonderful team at MacStories.
Hey Federico & Friends,
I saw your writeup about the App Store’s ten-year anniversary, and am looking forward to the coverage! I found myself nodding and smiling along to someone else’s life and career having been positively affected by the App Store.
Over a year and a half ago, I emailed this very same address about a new app my friend Austin and I just released called Brella. As you said yourself, “MacStories is considered by many one of the leading destinations to read in-depth and well-researched coverage about the apps that inspire us,” and it’s always been a small-time dream of mine to be featured on this site that I’ve been following for years.
Going into college, Austin and I didn’t know anything about developing apps. We were just two Apple fanboys that knew we liked messing around with computers. In the Fall of 2015, our first semester in college, we met each other while taking an Intro to iOS Programming class offered by a student-run project team called Cornell App Development. Taught by upperclassmen developers, we took our first baby steps into the world of app development.
Throughout lectures about MVC design pattern and UITableViews, we became friends and decided we both wanted to build an app together. Ithaca always has crazy, unpredictable weather, and we pondered an app solution while staring at foot-long icicles outside of a dining hall. That’s where Project Icicle began… the beginning of what would become Brella.
I went on to take the sister training course, Intro to Digital Product Design. There was a Weekly UI challenge about building a weather app. We wanted to present the most essential weather information at a glance, but a beautiful glance at that. People checked weather not so much for the data, but to inform other decisions… like what to wear in the morning. What if instead of unlocking your phone, opening an app, and sifting through numbers, icons, percentages to convert into some sort of clothing combination, that answer could be right on your lock screen?
I made a Swift Playground to test this cool idea during finals week, which wasn’t the best idea. The timing of the idea, that is, but I couldn’t resist. Austin received a WWDC Student Scholarship and went to San Francisco that summer and got design critiques on our initial weather mockups. That summer, I spent nights into mornings blearily checking StackOverflow and typing nonsensical commit messages until 5 or 6 AM. Austin found out local notifications weren’t going to cut it and embarked on learning how to create a backend service.
We were continuing our own training courses ourselves. In fact, from all of our experience, in Fall 2016 we both were accepted as core team members of Cornell App Development. Today, in fact, we help teach the same class to the next generation.
Fast forward to November 2016, before almost missing a bus headed home for Thanksgiving break, we finally released Brella after the most nerve-wracking app review wait. And of course there was a critical onboarding crash that had to be patched. Version 1.0.1 and (a tad bit more) stable, Brella sailed on, downloaded by friends and family with excitement or after being asked a half-dozen times. Around this time was when we emailed tios@macstories.net about our app. We didn’t end up hearing back, but no hard feelings at all, I totally understand. There’s still a little ways to go before we really get the app there, but then again that’s I’ll always feel.
We were fortunate enough to be covered by AppAdvice and Macworld, which gave us a small but dedicated user base. We kept adding to the app, from seasonal personality phrases and popular feature requests to figuring out how to conquer Daylight Savings on our server. For kicks, in Spring 2017, we entered a pitch competition that the College of Engineering was offering for personal endeavors and projects. To prepare, we had to look up what a “business model” actually meant, but we had some pride. The app had thousands of downloads in 50+ countries, and our app screenshots and videos looked the part. Well, the videos didn’t end up working, but their eyes lit up when we just put the phone in from of them.
But we never heard back… until the next year, this Janurary, in fact. Somehow, some way, we won for the best implementation of a working prototype. Being on the App Store certainly helped with that. Now, we had prize money, some attention, and a recommendation to talk to a mentor in the Entrepreneurship program. And that’s how we ended up being nominated for Student Business of the Year!
For two geek developers stumbling into entrepreneurship, I think we held our own in all this. And also figured out how much work goes into doing all of this. Bug patches, new features, more bugs, designing posters, handouts graphics, wait there’s more bugs now, answering user emails, maintaining a website, Facebook, Twitter… wait, an App Store editor just followed us?
Which leads us to the present and truly a gift in of itself: Brella was fortunate enough to be featured on the App Store just last week. We were featured under “New Apps We Love” on the U.S. App Store page, the very same day Apple ran their ten-year anniversary article, and “Apps We Love” on the Weather category page. As of writing this now (on 7/12/18), we’re currently ranked #9 in Top Free Weather Apps, and running new advertising campaigns to hopefully stay up there. We’ve been downloaded in 1+ countries about 7K times before the big blowup, now we’ve sailed past 50K downloads, 100+ countries, international App Store features, and onward and upward! (updated 7/31/18)
For Austin and I, this was always the dream. And it still doesn’t feel real. This goofy summer project was The Little Weather App That Could. It helped us get accepted onto campus project teams, receive recognition and honors, land job interviews, and nab amazing internships on both coasts. Maybe most importantly, we actually learned how to be software developers by just learning it on the fly, which I’m convinced could be the best way. Alright, maybe one or two college classes helped.
And this is all from the opportunity and potential and sheer power of the App Store. The fanboy in me wants to laud Apple, but honestly, it’s quite literally the developers that made it a reality. Starting from just 500 apps, it’s the crazy programmers, loyal users, tech journalists, everyone invested in creating and covering apps, that showed the world what all this could become. And then helped bring it to life. We’re both a part of that legacy. That’s really cool.
I saw in the Ten Year Anniversary Coverage Announcement you were reaching out to “developers making apps in recent years,” which is what what led me to share our story. I know this series has been planned months in advance, but I didn’t want to leave this untold, even if just for the MacStories team or just myself reflect on this wild ride. That being said, I know you regularly feature developers on AppStories, and Austin and I would be happy to share our experiences with any number of things: our Brella journey, computer science within college today, the part-time job of job hunting in the (mobile) dev industry, or even more about Cornell App Development’s apps, training courses, and sponsored Hackathons.
But most importantly, if nothing else… thank you. As I said over a year ago, MacStories is really one of the top Apple and even tech publications online today. I’ve discovered breaking news, brand-new apps and tools, and even scoped out worthy weather competition through this site. I can’t imagine how many people you’ve inspired to work from an iPad or rethink their productivity with your wonderfully painstakingly detailed writeups showing how to best take advantage of the best technology. Through this platform, you’ve brought the spotlight to the developers, helped them continue to do great things, and in turn empowered readers with excellent software and coverage.
So, if nothing else, thank you.
Please don’t hesitate at all to contact us about anything; it would mean so much to hear from the team! I will continue to be a loyal reader, and hope to see an even bigger spread for MacStories’ 10th birthday!
—
Matt Barker
P.S. Download Brella!
