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!

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 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.

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 🙌

This app and its platform is more frustration than it is fun. I’ve had a Birdbuddy feeder and the app for a few weeks and while it was engaging at first, the sheer volume and frequency of issues has quickly turned it into uselessness. The camera simply will not stay connected to the internet. It won’t identify birds and turn on (record) till they’ve been at the feeder for 5-10 seconds, which means it never gets those quick birds that dart in and out (I.e. the good ones you want to see). My “feed” is full of the same bully birds over and over and over again, yet it CONSTANTLY misses the woodpeckers and chickadees that visit the feeder.The best thing I can do with it is go into the live feed and manually take pictures of the birds that visit, but this is also an exercise in frustration. First, it takes 5 minutes to get the live feed working (have to make 5-10 attempts, shutting down the app over and over again to get it to work). Then, when you see a bird, you snap a bunch of pictures and send those off for identification. Ah, but it caps the number of pics you can take at 12, and once you’ve met the limit, you can’t simply save the pics and ID later. You have to send those off for identification, and of COURSE it kicks you off the live stream every time you do this. So every time you take a series of pics on the live stream, you have to spend another 5 minutes to log back into the livestream.Save yourself the hassle…try another brand, or save yourself some money and just go with a regular bird feeder.

Bought a bird buddy for my mom for christmas in November, with the free month of premium. Im not even going to say how annoying it was that the “free month” started as soon as I paid for the feeder because everything after was much worse. I ended up paying a discounted price for the whole year once the trial ended, a few days before christmas. My mom opened her bird buddy and made her account, set up the feeder and then I told her I would transfer the premium access to her account. Only to go on the website, attempt to change it, and it doesn’t work. It says “Failed to update email. Please try again later.” I tried again a few hours later. Same thing. I tried it on my computer. Same thing. I tried it the next day. Same. thing. I scoured the website for an email only to finally ask the AI chatbot for a real person to speak to because it keeps giving me the same unhelpful answer. I get an email asking to explain my problem, I respond explaining my problem. I wait 3 days. Which is understandable, it was holiday season. I get another email asking for my mom’s email saying they’ll figure out the problem. I’m like “yay! it’s getting fixed!!” I give them her email, and wait 6 days. 6 days of bot emails saying “we’ll be with you soon!” only, when i finally get a response, it’s literally a copy and paste of how to transfer premium access from the website!!(you know, the feature that WASN’T working and the whole reason i’d emailed them in the first place.) It’s been 3 weeks, also the premium access wasn’t even showing up on my app account to begin with!! It just keeps asking me to pay again on the app.

UPDATE:Bird buddy reached out to me and helped me with my issues. They had me take pictures of the damage and they listened to my concerns. Sometimes taking a breath and working with the maker/developer is the best route. Thanks Bird Buddy, you’ve stepped up and I appreciate you making it right. Five stars. The app is fine and I haven’t had any significant issues. Set up was difficult, but I got it working. My issues are with durability of the feeder itself. Given that there is no way to review the feeder on their site, brilliant idea for dissatisfied customers, I am going to go into great detail here. First, they stopped sending out the screw that attached the camera to the feeder and relied on a magnet to hold it in. I am in Ohio and maybe our squirrels are a little more robust, but they pulled it out in less than a week. They then chewed the multifunction button almost entirely off. That solar panel roof? Oh yeah, the engineer decided that running the cable outside the feeder would be a great option. Guess what?! Squirrels got to that too and chewed through it. Then, the mounting base broke. Now, customer service has told me it isn’t intended for squirrels, I know, I wanted birds. I followed all of the directions for keeping this feeder squirrel free, but it didn’t work. If you feel so inclined, go to their website and read the section on durability. Yeah, not durable at all. This was a Father’s Day gift from my wife because I am a bird nerd. Now I am constantly left trying to repair a $300+ bird feeder because Bird Buddy won’t help me. Also, if you want replacement warranty parts it will take WEEKS/MONTHS to get what you need. I really hope this informs some of you prospective buyers/owners. It is a rough deal.

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.

Edit: it’s clear that the developer is now resorting to buying fraudulent reviews on the App Store. This app saw an influx of high ratings over the holidays, and many of those user names have “bb” in them - clearly fake accounts created to juice their otherwise terrible rating. Buyer beware, this company is a hot mess, and continues to offer zero support for customers, and a very buggy product. The reviews which mention wifi connection problems are spot-on. The developer has chosen to do some odd custom interface for connecting the device to wifi, rather than use iOS’s built-in tools for this, presumably because they thought it would be more cross-platform. But it absolutely does not work. I’ve worked in tech for 20 years and am very familiar with getting finicky IOT devices onto wifi, I pulled out all the stops, and still can’t connect because of the custom interface they insist on putting on top of the process. My home network is the latest from Eero, a very popular consumer router, and even using Eero’s tools for badly behaved devices, nothing works. And contacting support does nothing, they’re clearly drowning in support tickets from the preorders finally shipping. Great idea, absolutely abysmal execution. As soon as I can get a response from support, I’ll be returning this failure of a device. They’re going to have a very rough holiday of returns and angry gift givers.

BirdBuddy gives an exceptional close-up view of birds. The physical device -- bird feeder with camera -- is truly Great. The app is necessary to see pictures and video, but creates an endless stream of data which must be "accepted" -- *one image at a time* -- by a live person, making it a time-sucking nuisance. Bird identification automation is better than expected. Would really help if it could better apply its smarts to catalog all data, maybe discarding images it is sure are junk (as it already does for the most part), but otherwise letting users see everything all at once, and be able to delete unwanted acquisitions. Postcards metaphor is cute and a nice idea, but the human cost of being forced to process everything is infuriating. Doesn't actually send postcards... it sends invitations to go curate the latest acquisitions... which makes them much less welcome... but the video and images are wonderful. BirdBuddy, PLEASE take the human out of the loop -- save everything and let us delete bad shots (there are very few, your software does well with that). Send actual images (postcards), not dreaded demands to go make pictures viewable.