PerchLens

The bird feeder itself is a decent concept, but everything else about this product is a complete disaster. The app is outrageously invasive and demands an absurd amount of permissions that no bird feeder should ever need, including precise location, microphone access, storage access, and even information about other apps installed on your phone. The privacy policy reads like a giant red flag, vague, overly broad, and clearly designed to let them collect and share as much data as possible without accountability. The software feels like some cheap, slapped-together white-label IoT garbage rather than a real consumer product. Setup was infuriating, unreliable, and completely dependent on their cloud services. I genuinely regretted connecting this thing to my network at all. Between the terrible software, invasive data collection, and sketchy privacy practices, this product feels more like spyware with a bird feeder attached. If you value your privacy or cybersecurity even a little, stay far away from this product.

1) I finally found where the automatically recorded clips are stored. It’s under Devices Messages not Album which I would expect where pictures would be. The reason why is that is important is when you click on the notification on your home screen and Birdty is already open in the background it can do several things but not one of them is bring you to the movie clips it notified you about. It will usually close Birdty or bring you to the home screen of Birdty. If Birdty is closed when you click on a notification it seems to go straight to the movie clips. 2) in the album the date is wrong. It seems to be a day behind. 3) I think also in the album I got a pop up error message in Chinese. I haven’t been able to recreate it. 4) The help section is nice on the main screen but the explanations in the light gray are very hard to read. Why can’t they be in black like the headings? Please be mindful of those of us with older eyes.

We got a smart birdfeeder from Costco for my elderly parents for Christmas. First, what works well: notifications for the camera spotting a bird are coming through fine. We can also see videos by visiting the “Device Messages”, but videos and images are not being automatically saved to the app’s album, which was confusing for my parents. Aside from that, video looks good and is timestamped. Everything else about the app is pretty poor though. There are many confusing buttons strewn across the app. The main page of the app shows a bunch of videos submitted by other users, which is also confusing to my parents. We could care less about other people’s videos. There are buttons for FAQs and Help, but the literature is clearly talking about lightbulbs and scenes, which make me believe the company is lumping help files in from their other products. It’s clearly made by someone who has English as a second language, and it’s strange to throw a bunch of help files for other products in the app when it is clearly focused on their birdfeeder cameras. We subscribed to the cloud storage and AI features, which was challenging and we presented with inconsistent price points depending on which subscription link we clicked on. Now that we are subscribed to the annual plan, it is not identifying birds and I can’t figure it out for my parents, it’s not obvious anywhere how to enable the AI features once you’ve subscribed. We only see the same timestamped videos with a “share” and “download” button. Saving to the album also does not trigger AI features. I can’t find any help regarding this feature, which was the main selling point for the subscription. Anyway, I think the low score on this app is well deserved. It is half baked.