Six things it will never do to you.
Every one of these is something the app will never ask of you. Not a feature waiting its turn, and not a setting buried somewhere. It simply does not do them.
- No scores
No global species counts, no rarity badges, no leaderboards, no points.
The robin on your spade handle is not a point. Give him a number and he becomes one more of a species you have already ticked, which is the opposite of noticing him.
- No audience
No followers, no algorithmic feed, no public comment threads, no stories.
Nobody counts your followers because you do not have any. Share something and it sits on a map of nearby gardens in the order it happened, and a neighbour can leave you a feather or a seed. There is nothing to grow.
- No guilt
No mandatory streaks, no guilt notifications, no cloud habit sync.
Scrubbing a bird bath is a chore, not an achievement. If you go away for a fortnight, nothing has been lost and nothing needs rebuilding.
- No homework
No wall of text, no paywalled articles, no raw spectrograms.
You are not here to read. What the app knows about a species arrives a little at a time as you watch one, and it sits beside your own notes rather than in a separate article.
- No admin
No folders to keep tidy, no separate place for photos, notes or sounds.
Ten seconds at the window should take ten seconds. If logging a bird ever feels like filing something, we have got it wrong.
- Nobody knows where you live
No exact GPS, no street-level maps, no nest locations, no automatic cloud backup.
Your garden is your home. Your exact location never leaves your phone. Anything you share is rounded, before it is sent, to an area about three and a half kilometres across, and the map is a drawing rather than a real place.
What it costs
Your journal is free, forever. So is seeing what your neighbours have shared, and sharing your own. A garden nobody can visit without paying is not much of a neighbourhood.
If you want to chip in, there will be a supporter membership at a couple of pounds a month. It buys you a seal on your garden and some nicer finishes. It will never buy you more reach than anyone else, and it will never be the thing standing between you and your own birds.