Engbird

I use this app daily to collect data from multiple devices. I was disappointed when the app updated this week. The “day” data page says no data is present even when it is. You can see the data is there by selecting week, then day. The csv output has been reformatted. Date and time are now two fields instead of one. This required a rewrite of the program into which I feed the temperature data. The column headers in the new version do not match the column contents. The version info says this update was for bug fixes. I had not encountered any bugs in the previous version, but this version is full of bugs. I hope a new bug fix is in the works.

I own a few Inkbird controls and I was excited to try another product with app support. Like the controls, the hardware is solid, the app, however, is underdeveloped. The UI is incredibly basic. It looks and feels like it was developed for a child - assuming the demographic for the device I purchased, though, is science/engineering. It also doesn’t offer much. No IFFF support. You can see a basic trend chart, but you can’t export it. The app freezes and doesn’t refresh the temp without closing/reopening. Also doesn’t have the ability to bring in things like the local temp to compare against the device temp. In 2022, it would be well worth the investment to developers a core app that pairs with all the Inkbird products. That would be a huge selling point. I noticed another Inkbird app in the store, but it also looks underdeveloped and doesn’t support the product I purchased. At this stage in the game, the market really expects products to come with that level of support. Inkbird already does that hard part well - the hardware - they just need a solid dev team to build this out.

I used this to monitor my fridges and freezers. I need to be within ≈15 to get a reading, which is ok. There is a feature within the app to get notifications when the temp or humidity is outside of your specified range. However, this does NOT integrate with iOS. There are actually no notifications. This makes the product only useful for historical information, not avoiding problems with current & pushed information.