I just got a new phone. First time using an iPhone. I was previously an android user. The most disappointing thing so far about my new phone has been the iNat app for iPhone. It seems to be missing a lot of very important features that the Android app has. So much so I almost want to keep an android phone around just for this app. It’s significantly better for me than both the iPhone and the web app.
I’m just wondering why this is? Is it simply less developed or are there significant limitations created by the Apple system that mean these features will never be present. The missing features I find indispensable are:
- Compare. when picking an ID the android app lets you compare your photos to the sample photos for the taxon.
- Taxa tree on the taxon page. I frequently use this to navigate up the tree to find the taxon I feel comfortable id’ing with. I also use this to explore and learn about taxa.
- “View observations” from the taxon page. I really miss this. It just brings you to the explore page prefiltered for this taxon. then I set the location to local and I can quickly figure out all the sub taxa that exist in my area. all in all the taxon view is just a lot less complete.
- It only lets you pick 4 photos. I usually pick all my photos and then look through them 1 by 1 removing the bad photos before I submit.
- Edit photos, I like to first copy some photos then crop to get a close up. You can’t do this on the iNat app.
- Creating an observation directly from the photos app. On android I can just select photos from the google photos app and share them to iNat to create an obs. On apple I can’t do that. This tends to be much smoother for me than selecting photos from the app.
- On the iPhone in creating an obs you are limited to the photos on the camera. In the android I get to select from my cloud accounts. This plus the previous problem makes it impossible for me to create an obs on my phone if I’ve recently cleared my photos.