Seek by iNaturalist

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1. ★★★★★plants stuck at dicot family level

   Inaccurate AI Slop as Edutainment Shovelware. If you are able to identify just about 10 plants yourself and know what dicots/monocots are, you are going to want to violently throttle the ai-slop consumers who created and swear by this app. This app is recommended so often despite being equal/worse to similar apps one has to suspect the hype is artificially generated. A data center somewhere is destroying nature so this app can miserably fail at telling you what a plant is.

2. ★★★★★accuracy degraded after update

   What happened to Seek?. This app used to be excellent and very accurate but since whatever update they made sometime in the past year, it is virtually wrong 75% of the time. The new AI model sucks and they should go back to the old one.

3. ★★★★★accuracy degraded after update

   used to work better. now it can never focus on anything and struggles to correctly identify anything or identify it past the first level of identification. cant even trust it when it does get the whole classification

4. ★★★★★plants stuck at dicot family level

   Labels everything as Dicots. No matter what plant I take a picture of 95% of the time it labels it as dicots. Do not recommend this app

5. ★★★★★other

   There’s Better certainly. I find it hard to navigate

6. ★★★★★accuracy degraded after update

   Spoiled by AI Slop. This app was 4.5/5 before the most recent update. Now I can’t get a single accurate response. 50% of my finds are “human” because my hand is in the photo (holding the flower or bug) or the AI picks up one of several species around the one I’m trying to nab (already a problem before, but much worse now), OR it’ll just completely and obviously miss the mark. A clear picture of a praying mantis turned up 3 different beetles and a type of ant before landing on a (incorrect) species of mantis. Disappointing for such a wonderful app.

7. ★★★★★plants stuck at dicot family level

   It worked fine until recently. Lately I can’t open the app and get it to identify anything, I have to take a picture outside of the app then imported but then there’s like a 50-50 percent chance of it just saying “we believe this is a member of the class of Dicots.” When it works, it’s great easily a four or five star, but this is not even worth one right now.

8. ★★★★★accuracy degraded after update

   Cannot identify things. Something has recently broken in this app. It used to be really accurate. Now, it regularly cannot identify a common object, but but most importantly it regularly misidentifies common plants. This does not give me confidence that it can actually identify things I don’t recognize. This is particularly problematic now that it was working a few seasons ago, but now cannot identify common things like live oaks. Point it at a native grass and it barely recognizes it as a grass. Point it at a block of concrete and it tells you it is a bird.

9. ★★★★★ridiculous specific misidentifications

   Inaccurate. Nearly every scan is wildly wrong

10. ★★★★★ridiculous specific misidentifications

    Not good. Can’t identify anything. Can’t save photos. Annoying to use

11. ★★★★★accuracy degraded after update

    Doesn’t work anymore. This app used to be 100% reliable. Now, it rarely even recognizes ANYTHING is in view let alone identifying it. Others say they’ve added AI. If so, go revert your code to beforehand, because THIS APP SUCKS NOW.

12. ★★★★★other

    Doesn't sync. App does not sync with website so you must use both. The year is 2026. Ridiculous

13. ★★★★★camera freezes and crashes

    What’s going on?. Loved this app but used to be able to upload a photo for identification. No longer works. Glitch in the latest update?

14. ★★★★★missing features and shallow species info

    Almost there!. This app does a lot of cool stuff! There are two reasons I don’t use it: - The initial safety “Remember screen” is not safe at all and a poor design choice. At least provide a setting to turn it off! I appreciate the warning and fully agree it should be there a few times, but not as a persistent message. This has the unintended effect of drawing a person’s awareness away from nature and into the app, ironically leading to them becoming less aware of their surroundings. App deloading can make this an even more frustrating experience especially when low power mode leads to that occurring more, compounded with this being more common for people going on long hikes, and even further since people that are into long hikes could also be more into Seeking things as they go along which drains battery further and thus low power mode. - It should give a link to the species after identification to quickly get to more details about the capture. This could be a direct link to Wikipedia or a prebuilt Google search link, anything to just get the species name easier into a place it can be searched for. EDIT: the link does exist, but only if you are logged into iNaturalist - On the species page, why can you not view other photos of the plant fullscreen?!

15. ★★★★★ridiculous specific misidentifications

    Multiple False Identifications. Says my dog is a gerbil among many, many wrong IDs. Too many wrong IDs to count. I am surprised this has a 4.8 star rating. Any browser image search gives accuracy.

16. ★★★★★plants stuck at dicot family level

    Not great. Everything I take a picture of says dicot family. I is not even able to always identify common plants. I would not recommend.

17. ★★★★★other

    Doesn’t work. I have uploaded over 100 clear photos and the app has yet to identify any of them.

18. ★★★★★app abandoned, no new challenges since 2024

    Abandoned. They stopped updating the app in 2024. They say there’s “minor bug fixes” in the logs, but the app and all its features are exactly the same as when I joined in 2024. Even the newest available challenge dates to December 2024. And it is missing a lot of species. Believe me, I know the these things. Not only do I use Seek daily but I am also a scientist with a phd in biology

19. ★★★★★camera freezes and crashes

    Lately it’s been very wrong. I used to love this app. It was a great way for me to explore the world around me and learn about the natural environment. But lately it either doesn’t recognize species, or the app freezes and has to be restarted.

20. ★★★★★plants stuck at dicot family level

    Dicots. Apparently every plant is a dicot, I never knew

21. ★★★★★other

    Google can do everything this app can do better.. I’ve fine that Google can do everything this app can do better. Which really sucks and I was hoping this app would be worth it, but it is. Google can do about the same thing just as well. In some cases even better.

22. ★★★★★ridiculous specific misidentifications

    Great idea but it can’t even identify a large mouth bass. Let me start by saying is such Great idea but it can’t even identify a large mouth bass because I set the bass in a spot where the cam could easily identify it but it couldn’t find any sign of life it also thought my Pomeranian was a fox

23. ★★★★★camera freezes and crashes

    Too Many Errors. It identified a rock as a flower, my cat as a dog, a million year old fossil of a fish as a flower, along with numerous other mistakes.

24. ★★★★★ridiculous specific misidentifications

    Not good.. It identified a pecan tree as a bird.

25. ★★★★★camera freezes and crashes

    Sometimes good. Iphone photos never properly upload to inaturalist from seek observations. Just ends up uploading a bunch of useless data with no pic. Identification can be extremely accurate or completely off. Just about useless for most native grasses as well. You won’t be able to identify birds unless they are basically in your hand. This app struggled to identify a common grackle at 2 yards

26. ★★★★★camera freezes and crashes

    Unable to take photos. Keeps crashing when I try to identify anything on iPhone 16 pro max

27. ★★★★★other

    No good. Has a hard time identifying anything, cannot recognize animals, very poor

28. ★★★★★other

    Can’t identify rabbit species. I have a couple of rabbits I wanted look into but it doesn’t offer any information.

29. ★★★★★ridiculous specific misidentifications

    Very inaccurate. Half the time it inaccurately identifies and usually it can’t even see bugs

30. ★★★★★camera freezes and crashes

    No longer works. I used this app for years but it has recently started giving this error message on my iPhone 16 pro Sorry, we weren't able to capture your photo [capture/unknown]: Error Domain=AVFoundationErrorDomain Code=-11800 "The operation could not be completed" UserInfo={NSUnderlyingError=0x139a8 6f70 {Error Domain=NSOSStatusErrorDomain Code=-16802 "(null)"}, NSLocalizedFailureReason=An unknown error occurred (-16802), AVErrorRecordingFailureDomainKey=4, NSLocalizedDescription=The operation could not be completed}