Penn Mobile vs Birdathon
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Penn Mobile
Streamline your campus experience with essential tools for student life. Access study room bookings, dining hall menus and hours, course schedules, and laundry machine availability. Quickly find fitness facility hours and emergency services.
- Study room booking
- Dining hall hours and menus
- Course schedule access
- Laundry machine availability
- Fitness facility hours
- Emergency services access
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Study room booking, dining hall hours, course schedule, daily menus, laundry machine accessibility, fitness facility hours, and quick access to emergency services! Penn Mobile was designed by students in Penn Labs with the intention of making your school life simpler. What does this mean? No more carrying your laundry four floors up trying to find a laundry machine. No more hunting for dining hall hours on the web. And no more struggles trying to book a study room. You can now do it all at the press of a button. Enjoy!
Birdathon
This app helps birdwatchers create and organize detailed checklists of their observations. It automatically records time and location, allowing for easy editing and customization. Users can visualize their sightings on maps, add field notes, and export data for sharing or further analysis.
- Observation-centric checklists
- Automatic time and location recording
- Customizable maps with boundary overlays
- Field notes for additional observations
- Multiple checklist sorting options
- Data export to CSV and other formats
- Create checklist templates
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Birdathon is an observation-centric tool for creating birding checklists. It helps you organize your checklists and share them with others. Use Birdathon in the field to quickly record whether and where a bird is seen or heard and the number observed. The time and location of each observation is automatically recorded. You can adjust the location, time entries and the count of birds observed at any time to ensure your records are accurate. You can add breeding codes to your observations. Checklist maps display the locations of your observations. You can overlay county boundaries for every US state. You can add a range circle such as a 5MR (5-mile Radius) to your maps. You can import and overlay custom kml/kmz files onto your maps. An Overview feature lets you see your combined observations for any time period, and displays a map showing any boundaries you have selected, so you can utilize the map feature even when you are not actively checklisting. You can export Overview data into a csv text file or create a new checklist template from the Overview. Your checklists can be viewed in taxonomic order, alphabetically, by rarity or as a timeline of species. You can enrich your checklist with field notes and add observations such as mammals, butterflies, wildflowers, etc., to make it a more complete record of your experience. You can organize your checklists into categories such as Day List, Year List, County List, Life List, etc., and assign color themes to your lists. Bird species may be added and deleted from your lists at any time. You can create new checklist templates from your previous lists or import templates created by others. You can change which template is being used. You can import text files into Birdathon, making them into templates or new checklists. Different export options for your checklists allow you to import into eBird or another copy of Birdathon. The bird species source data and other resources used in this app come from the following sources: AviList, a unified global checklist of birds, is the core data set used for Birdathon. https://www.avilist.org. Some data has been integrated from the following sources: The eBird/Clements checklist of birds of the world (https://www.birds.cornell.edu/clementschecklist/download/), the American Ornithological Society's (AOS) Checklist of North and Middle American Birds (https://checklist.americanornithology.org), and the American Birding Association's (ABA) checklist of North American Birds (https://www.aba.org/listing-taxonomy/) Alpha codes come from The Institute for Bird Populations’ Standardized 4- and 6-letter Bird Species Codes. https://www.birdpop.org/pages/birdSpeciesCodes.php. County boundary data is from the United States Geological Survey (USGS) TIGER/Line 2019 Shapefiles found on the United States Census Bureau's website at https://www.census.gov/geographies/mapping-files/time-series/geo/tiger-line-file.2019.html. Boundaries should be used as general guidelines and not be considered precise. Note especially where county boundaries follow creeks, rivers, ridge lines and other natural features, and so are of much finer resolution than can be shown on Birdathon’s maps. California breeding bird atlas blocks come from the California Bird Atlas, https://www.californiabirdatlas.org. California Bird Atlas logo and breeding code descriptions used with permission.
Screenshots
Verdict
Penn Mobile and Birdathon both sit at 4.6 stars, but that hides the real split: 100% of Birdathon's written reviews are positive against 53% of Penn Mobile's. Penn Mobile's advantage is in-app purchases (none vs 4) and update cadence (every 4 weeks vs every 4 months). On price, rating, ads and monetization model there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
Both are free to download. Birdathon sells 4 one-off in-app purchases. Penn Mobile asks for nothing beyond the download.
On the App Store both sit at effectively the same score — 4.6 for Penn Mobile against 4.7 for Birdathon. That said, the two scores are not equally well evidenced: Penn Mobile has 410 ratings behind it against 15, so its average is the more settled of the two. Written reviews are what separate them: 53% of Penn Mobile's written reviews are positive against 100% of Birdathon's.
Penn Mobile ships an update every 4 weeks, Birdathon every 4 months. The most recent releases landed on September 8, 2026 and September 19, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | Penn Mobile | Birdathon |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 4.6 (410 ratings) | 4.7 (15 ratings) — better |
| Positive reviews | 52.6% of reviews | 100.0% of reviews — better |
| Number of ratings | 410 — better | 15 |
| Update frequency | Every 4 weeks — better | Every 4 months |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | No — better | Yes |
| Monetization | Free | Free |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad | iPhone, iPad |
| Requires iOS | 17.6 | 16.1 — better |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 31 MB | 192 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | University of Pennsylvania | Barry Langdon-Lassagne |
Customer experience
Penn Mobile
Birdathon
Bugs and requests
Penn Mobile
Reported bugs
9 issues- Unable to log in after Duo pop-up
- Cannot load dining halls or retail dining
- Unable to log in with PennKey
- App does not open after recent update
- App prompts to log in every time
Show 4 moreShow fewer
- App does not save login after exiting
- Pop-up message: "Couldn't connect to API"
- App crashes frequently
- Dining hall information is incorrect or not shown
Requested features
6 requests- Include fitness center hours
- Include building directory of campus
- Fix API connection issues
- Update app for better stability
- Fix login bugs
Show 1 moreShow fewer
- Improve login persistence
Birdathon
Not enough reviews yet to summarise bugs or requests.
In-app purchases
Penn Mobile
No in-app purchases
Birdathon
- Good Tip$0.99
- Great Tip$1.99
- Amazing Tip$2.99
Show 1 moreShow fewer
- Incredible Tip$4.99






