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.
Developer Response
Hey, there!
Thank you so much for your feedback! The version you have is not yet widely accessible because we wanted to see if any changes still have to be made from feedback from a smaller number of users first before rolling this out to everyone. That said, I've passed your feedback to our devs team and they'll look into it!I hated this thing the first day. It didn’t seem like it was working. But then I read some people say that it takes a little bit. So I waited two days. Now I am in love with it! It’s so much fun getting postcards during the day. It does take a little time for the system to calibrate when you first set it up. I think it likes to build up a queue of postcards to space them out. I was expecting it to work instantly and it does not. But I love the way that it does it because I will randomly get postcards during the day. It sort of spreads out the fun.
If you have an expectation that this thing is going to be like a ring doorbell, it is not. It isn’t designed to give you instant notifications when a bird shows up. It’s made to do its job in the background and you to get cool stuff randomly throughout the day. If you calibrate that at your expectation, you will love this thing!
Developer Response
Hi, there!
We're sorry to hear your experience with Pro hasn't yet been satisfactory enough. If you're having any issues with your device, though, please reach out to our Support and they'll be happy to help!
You can open a ticket through this form and they'll get back to you as soon as possible: https://support.mybirdbuddy.com/hc/en-us/requests/new 🐦
If you're referring to any of the Beta features released in the latest app versions 3.0.0 and higher, please note that we released these as a public beta release to give people earlier access to some cool new features while these are still being tweaked and tested, and our team then takes any feedback into consideration in making the newer app versions better and to ensure they will work great and include users' feedback and wishes once they launch public outside beta. 😄I hate to write a bad review of a product I really do enjoy but it’s become almost unusable and I think they know it. Every few minutes I get an alert that I have a new bird. Exciting! But 90% of the time it’s a squirrel. My postcard feed is mostly squirrels. Not BB’s fault of course. They even have a feature where you can ignore certain species and not get notified about them. Perfect! But wait…that feature is only available for a monthly subscription fee.
Now I get it. Even if you buy their hardware (feeder/camera), you need to pay them MONTHLY to avoid being spammed by alerts for something their vaunted AI could easily just prevent showing you. It’s like they’re deliberately spamming me now to get me to subscribe. They clearly know the data around the number of squirrels they’re alerting users about and they saw a chance to make a buck. Really too bad they don’t consider this a basic feature since without it their product is annoying rather than fun.
Developer Response
Hey, there! Thank you for your feedback.
We're sorry to hear you had that impression but we want to assure you that we do not do this on purpose and actually don't influence the number of notifications you get (though we want to thank you for pointing the case with squirrels out in case we may manage to prevent those notifications if the recognized species is a squirrel!).
We just launched a new app (and firmware) update, which lets you change how many notifications you get! We heard our customers and wanted to do something about that. With the new update's Smart Notifications, you can receive fewer notifications in total and get a daily recap of your postcards. This means that even without ignoring the species, you won't get notifications for every time there's a new postcard. 😊
We hope that helps! 🐦I am loving Bird Buddy as a whole, but the identification aspect seems to be off more often than it should be. I feel like there could be some improvements to the app itself. For instance, if I delete a mystery visitor that was part of a visit from a known visitor, it deletes some of the photos or video from all visitors listed, as if it has assigned certain photos to the species it has identified it as, even if it’s wrong. The video should be assigned to all species listed in that visit and stay in each collection, even if you delete it from another. I lost a super cute video because it was labeled as a purple finch, along with a song sparrow. The only bird there was a song sparrow. When I deleted the purple finch album from my collection, it deleted the video completely instead of leaving it in song sparrow. Very disappointing.
My biggest suggestion at this point is that we should be able to “favorite” a photo or video and have it save in our collection in a “favorites” album, in addition to the species album it should already be in. That would make favorites easier to find. Seems like a simple update.
Developer Response
Hey! This is great feedback, thank you! We'll pass this along to the team. 🐦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.
I love the idea and I’ve captured some really cute moments. The camera gets some really good detail. But I’ve had to pair my BB 3 times thus far, most due to app not falling asleep at night or waking up in the morning. I’m going to have to pair it again tomorrow as it’s not sleeping and when I try to livestream it, which usually forces sleep, it says it’s not connected to the internet which it very much is by indication of my internet device. I will lie about my location next time since they clearly think I’m in CST or PST. So, I love it when it’s working properly and hate it when it isn’t because it is a hassle to constantly reconnect a device that is already connected. I should add I’ve had it up and running for a whopping two weeks. There’s big issues with this device and no one is addressing it. Furthermore, no one is publishing any review I’ve made to date. Until they get some real support techs in with this program, it’s just a cash cow to the developers. $300 plus is a lot of money for this. Mine was received as an early Christmas present. Don’t bite until they get things in order, it’ll just be another headache in your life occasionally lightened by a cute bird capture. Publish my review please!!
Developer Response
We're genuinely sorry for the inconvenience you've faced. Your experience matters to us. We'd love to make this right. Please share more details with us via this link so we can assist you better: https://bit.ly/3M28jJr. Thank you!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.
Developer Response
We're disappointed to hear about your experience. Your feedback is valuable in helping us enhance Bird Buddy. Please connect with us through this link to share more insights and allow us to assist you further: https://bit.ly/3M28jJr. Thank you!I love my BirdBuddy very much, but the recent updates have made the experience less pleasant. The update we just received at the end of October I absolutely hate. I now I have to scroll down a huge long line of full photographs to see all my daily visitors, where in the past the little pull down that just showed you everything very small and simple was very much preferred and much better. I also like the idea that we can now tap into other feeders around the world, but I don’t like that it puts those same pictures in the same collection area as my home postcards. There needs to be a separate section for personal postcards and then worldwide postcards. Also, I don’t like the update to the squirrel section, it used to have the same information that all the bird info shows and now it just says squirrel family with no information.
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.
Great gift for a bird lover; the integral solar panel makes it almost perfect. Now to get to 5 stars. Directions have pictures of perches for birds - there were no perches in my box but you can find hundreds of options in Etsy. Suggest changing the photos in the directions so people don’t go crazy looking for the parts. Navigation is confusing. If you have multiple photos in a bird “postcard”: it looks like if you skip them, they are deleted. There should be an option to not record the same bird you’ve seen before. We have 500 sparrows as dependents. List of birds should be able to be present it as just a list of names to sort by date or alphabetical as opposed to photos. When you look at a live stream, it APPEARS unless you close it out; this suspends recording.
Added 8/7/23 I don’t care if the sparrows are trying to communicate to me via American Sign Language - I do not need another sparrow photo taken!!!
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