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.

I keep reading bad reviews and a lot of negative remarks on social media about the wait time for this product. We all bought it with the knowledge it was being developed and the wait would be long. It was well worth my 15 month wait. Both the product and the app are brand new so everyone should expect some kinks. The company has been great about sending out email updates and keeping people informed. The app does randomly log me out sometimes, but logging in with your Google account or Apple ID means you don’t have to type your email and password every time. Worth it. The photo quality has everything to do with the direction your camera faces and mostly with how close the birds are. Some birds have a habit of standing in the food when they eat and they’re always out of focus 😂 Not Bird Buddy’s fault, just the bird itself. I really appreciate the ability to classify a bird as a “Mystery” to give me time to research and identify better. And I like being able to edit the type of bird in case it’s wrong. Overall I’m very pleased with the progress of the app and I LOVE my bird buddy. Highly recommend the solar roof add-on. I haven’t charged my battery in 10 days bc of solar charging 🙌

I backed the Bird Buddy on Kickstarter, and the company did a great job keeping me informed of the process while it was in development. I got my Bird Buddy last week, and found it fairly easy to put together and get up and running. At first I was disappointed that it did not take many photos - I would see a bird taking seed, but no "postcard" would be generated. However, they published an app update this morning, and now I am getting a lot of photos. The photos are also very good: clear, sharp, detailed. My one request at this point is as follows. Once in a while, the AI cannot recognize the bird. It then gives choices of possible species for the user to click to identify the bird. It would be better, however, if the user could type in the name of the bird, because each time this has happened, the choices given were all incorrect! If I could type in the bird name, I could correctly identify and categorize those photos. Overall though, great job Bird Buddy! I get so excited with each new photo!! UPDATE: the developers responded to this review with an email instructing me how to correctly identify unrecognized birds. Thank you, Bird Buddy!

Unless you are new to Bird Buddy and saving everything no matter what, the most commonly used button for more seasoned Bird Buddy users (that are more selective with what is actually worth saving) is the discard button. This latest update buries that button in a Multi-Option menu. What used to be a simple single click is now multi-click.What I don’t understand is why “share” stays on as a single click when I don’t think I’ve ever used it but once or twice in the past 1.5 years to share a clip with my a family member. If you have to bury something, bury share and give us back a single click discard please. Even if you don’t bury the share button, there’s still plenty of screen real estate to put a single click discard back where it is supposed to be. Heck, even just putting a red trash can icon on the screen will do the trick. I really don’t understand what the devs were thinking by burying the most used button, but I’m hopeful they’ll correct this mistake.Under Frenzy mode in my Pro account, I probably discard 25 to 30 sessions a day and save something from maybe 1 to 3 sessions a day. Easy to use discard is a must. If not for this mistake, this is easily a 5 star app.