CARROT Weather, Transit & Flo Premium Unlocked
This week is about the apps you open before you’re properly awake. The weather decides what you wear, the transit app decides when you leave the house, and a cycle tracker quietly keeps count of the days so you don’t have to. All three are free to download, and all three keep the part you’d actually miss — the widget, the timetable for the line across town, the deeper insight — behind a subscription. In these builds the subscription is already on. No subscriptions, no waiting. Download any of them as an IPA and install on your iPhone in one tap — no PC and no developer account of your own.
CARROT Weather
CARROT Weather is essentially a one-person studio: Brian Mueller, working from the suburbs of Philadelphia under the name Grailr, writes the code, draws the art and writes every one of the jokes. The app has been on the App Store since March 2015, and its hook is the forecaster — a sarcastic robot with five personality settings, from a polite “professional” to an “overkill” mode that swears at you about the rain. Under the attitude sits a serious weather app, good enough to take the Interaction category at the 2021 Apple Design Awards, with side quests on top: more than 150 secret locations to track down, 80-plus achievements and an AR mode that puts CARROT in your living room.
The free tier gives you the forecast and the insults. The subscription is where the everyday tools live: Lock and Home Screen widgets, rain and severe-weather notifications, radar maps, Apple Watch complications and extra data sources such as AccuWeather and Apple Weather. The developer lists Premium at $4.99 a month or $19.99 a year, and Premium Ultra — CarPlay, super-res radar, multi-model forecasts — at $9.99 a month or $39.99 a year.
What’s unlocked: the subscription in version 6.9.2, so the premium features work without an active plan. If they don’t switch on straight away, tap Restore Purchases and reopen the app.
Transit
Transit comes from Montreal, where Sam Vermette and Guillaume Campagna started it; it has been on the App Store since June 2012 and now covers more than 1,000 cities. It answers the question every commuter asks at the door — when is the next one really coming — by blending agency data with its own ETA predictions and with GO, a mode where riders who keep the app open on board share live vehicle positions with everyone else on the line, and get alarms for when to leave and when to get off. Trip planning mixes bus, subway, train, ferry, bikeshare and scooters in one route, and schedules, stop maps and the trip planner keep working offline when you lose signal underground.
In 2021 Transit introduced Royale, its subscription. Next departures and trip planning stay free for everyone; full schedules and maps for lines farther from where you are, plus themes and transit-inspired app icons, sit behind it. At launch Royale cost $4.99 a month or $24.99 a year. In some cities the local agency pays for it on its riders’ behalf — this month’s update welcomed the 200th agency to do so.
What’s unlocked: the subscription in version 6.3.5, so the paid features are available without an active plan.
Flo
Flo is the cycle tracker from Flo Health, founded in 2015 by brothers Dmitry and Yuri Gurski in Minsk and now run from London; its App Store listing counts more than 570 million downloads. The basics are free: log your period, symptoms and moods — more than 70 of them — and Flo predicts your next period, ovulation and fertile window from what you’ve entered, irregular cycles included. It adjusts as life changes, with modes for trying to conceive, for pregnancy with weekly updates, and newer tools for perimenopause. On privacy, Anonymous Mode, introduced in 2022, lets you use the app without a name, email or other identifier tied to your health data, and you can download a cycle report to bring to an appointment.
Premium is the deeper layer: daily personalised insights and expert-led videos, in-depth pregnancy features, a Symptom Checker, a round-the-clock Health Assistant and anonymous community chats. Flo is clear in its own listing that its predictions are for information only — it isn’t medical advice and isn’t a method of contraception — so anything that worries you is still a conversation for a doctor.
What’s unlocked: the subscription in version 10.8.0, so the Premium features are open without an active plan.
How to install
All three install from builds.io like a normal App Store download — tap GET, install, open. No PC, and no developer account of your own to keep alive. When you add a new device, Apple runs a one-time “processing” step: most devices are ready within a day, and some take up to three days while Apple works through them. It happens once, and every install after that is instant.
Last week’s apps digest was about pictures — Photo Lab, TouchRetouch and ibisPaint X. For more apps that come with the paid tier already on, see our list of 23 premium-unlocked apps for iPhone.