Bird Buddy: Tap Into Nature Hack 2.7.0 + Redeem Codes

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!

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.

In my experience, the initial instructions were somewhat confusing. It seemed that the version of my BB software / firmware was not in sync with the online app info.
Once I got it updated, installed and sending postcards, it was time to charge the battery and when I did so and put the camera module back in the BB, there was a problem. I reported the problem through the bot option. It said I needed human help. Sounded good. That was 2 days ago. I received an email confirming they received my request for help yesterday. In the meantime, the email included “Please kindly allow up to 7 business days ……”. And now BB app says camera module is “Out of the feeder” when it is not, and it is magnet to magnet so not upside down. I have searched through troubleshooting articles for what to do when the app says Out of the feeder, but to no avail. So I wait. And wish there were better instructions or tutorials. (I am a retired technical procedures writer and know the importance of writing for the audience of the app/process)

I just received my new bird buddy and was super excited after waiting nearly 2 years for it to arrive. I was incredibly disappointed to find that I can’t even get past the connect to WiFi step. I am an IT consultant, so I’m very familiar with setting up a 2.4ghz WiFi network with WPA2. I have a network setup like this specifically for older devices that won’t work with 5ghz. Regardless, the bird buddy refuses to stay connected to it. I can actually see the traffic on my network, and it briefly connects then disconnects over and over again until the app finally says it failed and that I should attempt a factory reset. I have done this over and over, including attempting to setup a new SSID with wpa1, another with wpa1/wpa2, and different names and passwords but regardless of what I try it won’t connect. I reached out to support and waited 5 days as requested with no response. I reached out again and it’s been multiple days again. I’m so frustrated with them and wish I could get my money back (or quite frankly, just a working bird buddy). If you haven’t purchased one yet, don’t waste your time.

Update: the developer had time to respond to my message here to tell me they would reach out but it’s been weeks still with no response from their official support team. Ridiculous.

Update: So, an update made it so I at least get the postcards (photos). Still no live feed. App is working, but biggest complaint is the “postcards” for new birds. If you have a birdfeeder, you will get dozens per day of instances. About half the time (no fault of the app) it can’t identify the bird because they’re blurred moving quickly or mostly turned away. But that means you have to open their “present”, then some animations, then sort through each picture with a bunch of “no”s. It takes a long time. Could work much faster if they could thumbnail the 4-8 pictures on each visit to just ditch the batch quicker. The unit works fine, although does burn through battery rather quickly. I’m not complaining about the wait time. I was fine with that. The app is really bad. I bought it for my wife and I can’t check the live feed and it was a real difficult set up. Very hard to initially set up and the app is just not good.

UPDATE UPDATE:
Yeah, I got like 31 dumb little treasure chests with animations and several pictures in each one, this would take at least an hour to go through. Tighten it up.

I was a fan and supporter of the BirdBuddy despite all the early bugs (bad IDs, lack of sensitivity to visitors, poor battery performance, syncing problems). There are always issues when a new product goes to market, I get it.

But now Buddy has released the solution! Well, for a fee. To increase the sensitivity of the camera (that I already paid about $300 for) so it actually photographs birds, at the expense of its own battery life, I need to pay to unlock “pro?” What the heck? I watched from my window today as two finches, a scrub Jay, and a hummingbird came to my feeder. Bird Buddy recorded none of them. Can’t increase the sensitivity of the camera without paying for “frenzy mode” I guess. And since I share/receive access to feeders with some friends and family (my favorite feature of these feeders) upgrading my account wouldn’t increase the sensitivity of their feeders if they don’t have a pro account, so I’m still missing out.

I was planning to buy a couple more of these, and I’ve been talking them up to friends and family, but I probably won’t get any more and won’t talk these up anymore if users need to pay just to get them to photograph birds properly. What a scam.

I have a very active feeder with a generally the same population of birds/species visiting regularly. The app treats each of those as a “present” for me to open/reveal. After a busy week of not tending to the app I now have hundreds of these presents to open. I want this app to treat all known birds like a photo feed - just show me the photos. Give me easy tools to remove photos i don’t like or want to keep. Same for the videos. When there are birds that can’t be identified due to backlighting or shadows, have those show up in a filtered view so i can identify them or delete them. When there is a new bird that i haven’t seen before or don’t see often maybe then use the “gift” animation for revealing them. I absolutely respect the work this team has done on the hardware/firmware side - my kickstarter edition feeder went from needing to be charged daily to now not having been charged in weeks due to optimizations in the firmware that have really made the solar a must-have feature. At present though (pun not intended) the app design is tiresome and saps the joy from using my feeder.