Bird Buddy: ID & Collect Birds

I was really excited about this smart bird feeder and the application. Before buying this Bird Buddy I purchased another bird feeder and the app was so terrible. I did some research and it seemed like Bird Buddy was the way to go if I wanted a good app experience. The unboxing and setup process was excellent and the app's user interface is impressive. It feels modern, is easy to navigate, and has some cool features like "BB TV," where you can watch live feeds from other feeders. I also appreciate that it clearly displays the WiFi connection status and battery life. However, after about a week of use, the experience has become increasingly disappointing. #1 The AI for identifying birds is absolutely horrible. I frequently receive notifications for a new species and get all excited just to find out it's the same eastern bluebird that I always see. Don’t get me wrong, I love him, but man does it get my hopes up when I think I’m about to see a new bird and it turns out to just be Frank, the same old bird showing up for the tenth time that day. I would honestly prefer it didn't even attempt an identification than to be wildly wrong. Or perhaps a setting to turn off AI identification. #2 The biggest problem I have with this app is the notification system. I rarely receive a notification when a bird is actually on the feeder. The alerts usually come 20 minutes later, or, not at all. There’s been so many times where I’ve physically seen a bird on the feeder and no notification at all. The most absolutely annoyingly frustrating thing though, is when I receive a notification, go and check the video, and it’s a 58 second long video, with the first 56 seconds showing an empty feeder and the bird showing up two seconds before the video ends WHILE THE BIRD IS STILL THERE. Soul crushing. #3 The app doesn't record video or take postcards while you’re in live stream. With the notifications being so unreliable I have been checking the feed constantly. Sometimes I am lucky and I just happen to turn it on when there’s a bird there. But then I realized that if I do that, there’s no video or postcards for that visit. So I’ve resorted to screen recording in that scenario. Overall I think this app has a lot of potential, but the core functionality of having the ability to see birds enjoying your feeder with reliable notifications and photos/video is lacking.

I have two BirdBuddy feeders. For the past month the software seems to be incapable of identifying even the most common birds. The hummingbird feeder doesn’t ID a hummingbird. App needs to be reworked.

I loved it for the week it worked. Took it out to charge and now it doesn’t work. I have tried all the tips but still won’t connect with my WiFi so I don’t see anything anymore. The tips are useless for me. Can hardly see the tiny color when I try to connect and turn on. It was a Christmas gift. I was going to buy the hummingbird one but because of this bad experience. I won’t waste my money.

During the last few days House Finches have been identified as curved Bill thrashers (multiple times), great tailed grackle, verdin, northern Mockingbird, phainopepla, roadrunner, Brown headed cowbird, and gamble’s quail. The AI in the beginning, got some of these correctly. Now, the house finch is renamed any random bird. Not only is this app useless for bird ID, but negatively impacts education for beginning birders.

The camera is excellent! The things that I wish it had like Birdfy is time and date stamp with a calendar of my bird visits. A squirrel proof feeder with a camera would be appreciated too!

The batteries are charged and recharged at work for one day and disconnect it from the Wi-Fi and after many attempts and reinstalling the app and Wi-Fi it still does not connect When it worked, it was fantastic

When i first got this app i love the cute cartoons when I wanted to know more about the birds but then it got an update and it is so much more boring and i hate to be rude but please just tell me are you going to change it back

Daily enjoyment seeing up close the beauty of Gods creation

I loved this app until I added another person to the camera, losing my access to livestream. When I tried to reclaim it, I was never able to reconnect. I get to the point of entering a WiFi password which is not accepted. There are no resources to troubleshoot this problem.

This must be the most-improved app I have experienced, and it keeps getting better. There is effective in-app help; it is generally much more communicative. The change that helped most was replacing my old router. Now, it just works…. 👍👍👍 -——————- Where to begin? This product was developed for enthusiasts who suffered through their product development, and so might have learned what it was supposed to do, and maybe even what it would take to get it up and running. But anyone new to it has yet to discover the potentially complicated router setup revision - or even replacement - according to their [non-existent] up-front guidance and requirements. For example, they contradict Apple guidance to use the same SSID for two bands, saying the SSID can’t be the same for both 2.4 and 5 GHz bands. They had no good answer when I asked ‘Why? It’s 2.4 GHz only, so can’t see what the 5 GHz band is doing’. They seem to think you’ll be ok mucking about with your router settings just “because they say so”, without regard to what else on your home network could get messed up in the process. Neither do they have an overview of product setup, or explain that it has two different phases, each of which could well take hours. Or what to do when it gets stuck attempting a firmware update, which it might attempt when first turned on. I found myself stuck, told strongly to touch nothing until it finishes. How long are you willing to wait before concluding it really is stuck, quitting, and preparing to repeat installation again from scratch? Problems? Oh, just call us at 1-800-we-won’t-answer. (I waited 45 minutes on hold until I gave up.). Not keen to do that again. I submitted a support request via their webform, providing the detailed info it required, only to get form-letter e-mail ‘we haven’t forgotten you’ for 7 days, then being advised to do everything I had already done -twice, (except for the part about mucking around with the router, which has worked perfectly for several years). The support is a web form submission, so there’s no copy of what you sent. They have no overview of what this thing is supposed to do, as if its behavior were intuitively obvious to the casual observer. Nothing even basic. Everything you can find in the phone app FAQs is scattered like buckshot. Their home webpage only sells, it has nothing like an overview of how you should treat it. Turn it off? Turn it on? How? Why? Why not? God only knows! And he’s scratching his head, wondering, too. Perhaps this criticality stems from its use of an iPhone, with limited capacity to provide readable documentation. But there is absolutely no excuse for the lack of this on their website. It’s reasonable to wonder why I bought it. I didn’t, It was a gift from my daughter, so I’m trying real hard not to disappoint her, or make her feel bad about the wrenching experience with it thus far.