以下为 WeatherKit 团队幕后采访英文原稿，你也可以阅读翻译后的 完整文章。

Introduce your team

Hello everyone. I'm Raul Perte and today I'll guide you through WeatherKit's history. 4 years ago, I started learning Swift and that's how the first version of WeatherKit was laid out and here we are, 4 years later, WeatherKit is a self-sustainable company. 

Right now, we are 5 core team members, helped by a handful of freelancers and volunteers who work behind the scenes. I handle the design, my brother Adrian does the iOS development, my good friend Iancu writes the Android app while Ioana helps us with marketing and social media. 

The whole team is distributed, working mostly from Romania and Germany. 

Since we have so many excellent weather apps, such as CARROT Weather, why did you choose to create a weather app from scratch?

The weather app market as we know it is fully saturated. While most disconsider this market entirely, we see it as a challenge to do better and to explore the unexplored. CARROT Weather is a fantastic example of a great weather app that built an audience.

WeatherKit is not as complex and comprehensive as many weather apps do, I even saw some people claim it to simple. What do you think of this opinion? Can you explain the design concept of WeatherKit? 

The first and second versions were very simple and the general feedback was that we need to add more features - we can't just show the temperature. I never used the first 2 versions as my main weather app and that pretty much applied to everyone. When we decided to continue working on it, the goal was to create a gesture-based application that can handle as much data as possible in a nice way. Design-wise, WeatherKit 3 is a lot more complex than we thought it would be. We now have a modular design system that enables us to add tiny little features pretty fast. 

As we can see, design is a very important factor to WeatherKit, What choice have you made in the design of WeatherKit, have you ever give up on some functions or usability for design? 

We did that in the past and we learned it the hard way. In the first two years, the app has made a total of $735. From the scratch, we had the wrong mentality about it. People don’t care about beautiful, pixel-perfect design, they only appreciate the whole experience. We were proud about its design, but at the same time, ashamed that we can’t really use the app on a daily basis. That moment it hit me. 

How it works is crucial to me. We delayed launches because the transition wasn't smooth enough. There had been compromises here and there in order to allow the app to grow, both on the design and features side. As an example, it took us 4 years to find a good solution for weather maps and when we found it, we implemented it in under one month. Think slowly, ship faster. 

You said most weather apps has disconsidered the market and you want to explore the unexplored. What do you mean it? How is the ideal weather app like according to your standard?

Ideally, I’d like to see WeatherKit one day in the future, 100% accessible for everyone. Weather is more than temperature - and we’re on a good path to help educate people about how weather affects our daily routines. 

Can you talk about the future plan of WeatherKit? For example, will it support Siri Shortcuts, watchOS or macOS?

Definitively yes, but because we're a small team, our priority is to tweak the current issues. We are constantly looking at the usage of Siri Shortcuts and when we'll see that it is actually being used, we'll prioritize its development. 2019 is a long year though and most likely it’ll be the year of Shortcuts coming to WeatherKit. 

watchOS is not a mature platform, yet. The Apple Watch app was already developed - but we aim to improve it for an average response time of <1s. That would be something that would make the watch app useful and not just a useless extension. It's a constant effort to find ways to make one of the best watch apps there. 

I don’t think we’ve ruled out one single idea until today and Adrian’s waiting to see how Marzipan would work out for WeatherKit. It can be done, but it also has to be sustainable in time with no additional costs for those who are Pro users already. 

Apple Watch has come to the 4th version and it gets pretty faster than ever before. Many people treat Series 4 as the iPhone 4 of Apple Watch. Why do you say that watchOS is not a mature platform? Can you explain what a qualified smart watch should be like in your opinion?

The Series 4 is a magnificent device. I’m wearing it 95% of the time, but I cannot get myself to use any apps because most of the times it’s just faster to unlock my iPhone and do it there. However, making the watch ping the device to make some API calls, then send that data back to the watch - is not a realtime, nor pleasant experience. 

You mentioned before there will be more functions related to AQI in WeatherKit?

I strongly believe that AQI is just an index for scientists and most of the people don't know what that number means for their health.  To make the air quality index, we have to educate the people about it because it has a huge impact on our lives.  Similar to how Kelvin is"translated"into Celsius / Fahrenheit.

The roadmap has push notifications for when the AQI is over a certain threshold and other little changes to how we display the AQI. 

You offer a lifetime purchase option alongside the subscription option, is it because you are lacking confidence of subscription? Why do you offer the lifetime option, will you be worried that it would affect your income in the future?

In my opinion, every app jumped way too early on the subscription bandwagon and now everyone is sick of them. That switch also created a trust issue with many apps tricking people subscriptions.

Not everyone trusts subscriptions but truth is, subscriptions keep the lights on for us. 50% of the people who use WeatherKit Pro are using the subscriptions while the other half made the lifetime in-app purchase. That, to me, is a clear sign that subscriptions are not perfect yet and the best practice would be to offer both at the same time. 

WeatherKit has been recommended on App Store in US region many times since the 3rd version came out, what factors do you think make WeatherKit been recommended?

The AppStore feature took us by surprise and it was incredibly satisfying for all of us to see our efforts being compensated. WeatherKit 3 was an 8-month effort from our team, with the app being rewritten from scratch to improve every little part of the user experience. We picked up a trend in our feedback group that most of the weather apps are functional apps that don't care about the user experience. From the stock Weather.app, there were many improvements that we built upon. It is our finest work to date and we are incredibly proud of it.

Today, WeatherKit is known as a beautiful and practical weather app and my guess is that Apple shares the same opinion. 

Have you ever considered developing more apps except WeatherKit? 

Yes. In our spare time, we also develop apps for clients and one of our main goal for 2019 is to ship 80% of WeatherKit's new features and additions so that we can grow and develop other apps as well. That move has some associated risk, but no matter what other apps we might make in the future, WeatherKit is our priority and we don't see the end of it. We are dedicated to support WeatherKit forever, aka until the end of the internet.