Taste matter

There’s this app called !Weather. Its whole point is, believe it or not, to show the weather. Exactly the same weather that the built-in Weather apps.

At the same time, !Weather is partly paid. Want weather widgets? Pay for a subscription.

At first glance, this is complete nonsense. Who in their right mind would pay for weather you can check literally anywhere. Moreover, all the apps from the developer, Not Boring Software, are things that already exist for free: a timer, a calculator, a habit tracker. All with subscriptions. If people made rational decisions — this company would have gone bankrupt yesterday.

But — I’ve been paying for !Weather for several years now. The subscription is cheap enough to pay once a year and forget about it. And the app, every time I open it, brings me joy. It’s beautiful, with great sound design and a clean UI (and you can also pop clouds — it doesn’t affect the actual weather, but it’s calming anyway).

When I wrote last week about how the idea is becoming more important than the execution, I actually missed one important detail. Taste can matter even more.

In a world where anyone can write their own weather app, branding and design come to the forefront. In a world where anyone can execute any idea — the difference lies in who does it more beautifully.

In a world of scarcity, we treasure tools. In a world of abundance, we treasure taste.