Birdbuddy: ID & Collect Birds

I derive genuine joy from being able to check up on the birds at my feeder. The feeder itself is friendly to most birds but a few species do seem to avoid this design and favor only my adjacent tower feeder. I have also been impressed by the quality of the images that show up each and every day. A few ideas for improving user experience with the app. (1) The ability to manipulate camera sensitivity. I often see a new species that alights for 20-60 seconds not get captured by the camera. I’d simply prefer a more sensitive camera and have no problem with more images to sort. Others may want fewer. The “ignored visitors” setting kind of gets at this but still doesn’t offer enough user control over the experience. (2) A better collection/gallery experience. Your ideas are probably better than mine here, but I think we can both agree that this area leaves something to be desired. Also, I want to be able to see what my friends and family are seeing on their feeder and don’t really care about what strangers see. (3) Let people turn off notifications for more than a week (i.e indefinitely). Maybe the biggest turnoff (even though it’s a small thing) because of gimmicky it is. I’d probably use the app more if I wasn’t so annoyed about having to do this once/week. It’s silly. All in all it’s a neat product package and people seem to thing the developers are responsive to feedback. Hopefully they continue to make improvements and people keep spreading the word about how neat these things are.

ADDENDUM: A new version was just released that fixes my issues below. Much improved, now 5 stars! Overall it is a lot of fun to be able to see birds up close. It takes great pictures and the solar panel works great. Before I had the solar panel the battery life was limited and I had to recharge every few days. A few kind of annoying things: 1) The biggest one is that there is no way to “mute” or silence birds. As a result you get tons of alerts/postcards of the same species (in my case house finches). Each requires multiple taps. It would be really nice if you could group or mute birds so it takes pictures, but you can see them only if you want to (ie. “House finches came to your feeder 15 times today, click here to see the pictures”). Then you can still see the pics, but you don’t have to spend a lot of time clicking through the same species 15 times per day. 2) The identification algorithm is good but not great. Biggest issue I have with it is that it will identify birds as a species that are not found anywhere around where I live (for example, it will identify birds here in the Pacific NE as a bird found only in Florida). Granted weird things happen but geographic location should be a pretty big factor in the ID. Overall is fun, and worth the purchase, but the details are still being worked on.

Many people are leaving app reviews here based on their experience with the Bird Buddy feeder itself, which isn’t fair or accurate, especially if they’re negative since there is a bit of a learning curve with the product. I have had a few connection challenges here and there but man, this thing is SO COOL, and worth figuring out and resolving whatever sporadic glitches you may encounter along the way. That said, I’m going to review the APP, not the feeder (which is FANTASTIC, btw). This is a totally new product, and the developers of both the feeder and the app are continually working to make improvements based on user feedback. I’ve already seen this, with a recent app update that has eliminated having to sign in every few days. Seeing this helpful fix implemented within mere days of ppl complaining about it gives me great hope and optimism that this app will continue to get better on an ongoing basis. At the time of this writing, the photo review process is a bit clunky (more animated graphics and click-throughs than should be necessary), but the ID feature is impressively accurate, and the ability to sort, organize, and share pics is fairly intuitive. And the features of seeing when the pic was taken, finding out more about each species, and hearing audio of what the corresponding bird sounds like are icing on the cake! I was never into bird watching or identification before, but this has made me a fan, and I look forward to the experience getting even better over time! Thanks, Bird Buddy!