Foraging with the "Wildman" App Reviews

This app has several things going for it, the excellent color photos, warnings about poisonous lookalike plants, cross references. The thing that bugged me was the disclaimer popping up each time the app was opened. Once at time of purchase is ok, not each time the app is opened. Also, a little pricey. But still ok.

Very handy reference for foragers, herbalists, and anyone with any natural curiosity about whats growing around them! Great pictures make safe identification easy. Lots of focus on safety. A definite must if going on a foraging tour with The Wildman, and a great companion to the books!

I bought this app from Steve the Wildman Brill for one reason; it was created from first hand knowledge and he is accessible to meet and talk to. He offers first hand accounts of all the plants he speaks of. I am using this on a 4th gen ipod touch. I like the categories that each plant entry offers (uses, recipes, warnings) and the ability to take your own notes. There also seems to be good vision for future enhancements. My kids and I are already out gathering and cooking great stuff!

We love the app, even more so after the tour of prospect park to reinforce what we learned foraging too! Highly recommend for homeschoolers, encourage your young naturalist explorers with detailed info as you interact with nature.

I took a class with Steve Brill in central park a few weeks ago and afterwards bought the app. Since then, it’s helped me to confidently identify a handful of wild plants that I’ve brought home and cooked with. It’s also got great directions on how to prep and store and cook. Definitely worth the price, considering the potential to save on simple groceries like garlic, greens, tea, etc.

This is just what an app needs to be. You can choose which plants you want to see for each season as well! Wildman is a self-taught forager. I remember foraging with him. His sense of humor even in this resonates clearly.

Went on a foraging tour with the Wildman and bought the app that same day. I love it!! High quality photos, super easy to navigate, and lots of reliable information. If youre going to learn, learn from an expert. And if you can, definitely take some of his foraging classes. Theres no substitute for the real thing!!

This update takes 2 gig of space - more than a GPS map database

What I really wanted this for was adding pictures to geographic locations, so I could look up what plants I found and where I found them. I just wanted to be able to add a pin with a note and picture attached. It seems I can only add a note when Im in a plant entry. I like the idea of being able to look something up, yes I too use my phone, theres not a lot of plants from my western, scrub-oak environment on the ap anyway. Its already too big, though. I had to delete a ton of stuff (I have 16gb) just to get the ap to finish. I just dont think you can fit enough on there to be able to do that offline.

I’ve been using this app since it first came out and have always enjoyed it. This current update sounded promising until I found out the app used up the rest of my drive space and it showed as 3.75 GB usage for the app. Yikes! Also it is extremely slow and glitchy on a 4S. Trying to view image resulted in images loading slowly in chunks (and that was with my very high speed wifi connection.) I can’t imagine trying to view an image in the field. Unfortunately I had to delete the app because it is pretty much unusable for me now. It will be easier to carry Samuel Thayer’s foraging books with me in the field than try to use this new version. I do hope they resolve this problem soon.

I use this app for all my foraging excursions in the northeast US. The setup is user friendly and you can filter results in various ways. It has helped me identify many plants, and also inspired new plants to search for. It even has recipes and recommended uses. I would recommend this app for anyone that wants an offline pocket database of wild edibles.

I use it all the time on hikes. There is no other foraging app with this much detail and usability.

I used to love this app. It was an essential part of any hiking excursion. Now it crashes within a minute or two every single time I try to use it! Wish I had a warning before updating, I would have left it alone. As it is now, this app is useless. Will try it again after I get a new phone, but not getting my hopes up.

Tired of the crashing. Want my money back. Big long story under dandelions about how the author was persecuted over 30 years ago. Let it go, man, let it go.

Great app!! I use it often and I love the humor!

This used to be my favorite app, an I used it all the time. But now it just crashes every time you open it, after 5 seconds! Its very frustrating especially as much as the app costs! When you fix this Ill give you more stars...but for now I give you one...Id give none of that was an option!

Havent been able to get past the disclaimer screen since the last update. Either freezes or crashes as soon as I press accept.

Update #2 So the last update now causes the app to crash whenever I touch the letters on the side of the list of plants. Update. They have made it clearer you dont have to download the high res images and added a search bar in response to complaints. Good in the developers. So I eased my review to 2 stars. The app is still poorly laid out. Especially for the small vertical iPhone screen. For instance having to click an extra button to see picture comments just reduces the usability. The layout of the descriptive info on the pant pages is a pain. Yes their is the bell and whistle of resizing the text vs image screen space but nothing is designed to work together. The location notes are a fine idea but awkward to use. Navigation is a pain because the is no way to get back to a home screen after following a trail of associated plant. If you go carrot to parsnip to hemlock through the similar plants links you can only travel back with many back arrows. This is a fundamental design flaw. Search by name, features, and association should be the bedrock of this kind of app. Again all that was needed was more plant. Still a big screw up of what was the best plant ID app. ----- I have met Steve and enjoy his courses. I support him in general and loved having the previous version of the app in my pocket as I wandered the city learning edible plants. This redesign is ill conceived. First the obvious thing I think is the assumption here is the app is best on an iPad as that is how Steve uses it in his walks. I dont. I use it as a lite confirmation app on my iPhone which is always with me. I need various search criteria to find plants based on environment season etc. I do not have room for a multi gigabyte download of hi res photos. I also dont need recipes on the go (that is a better iPad app) so I am glad you have moved that to a separate app though it would be cooler to give previous users the separate recipe app free since we just loss that content. Overall the only update this app really needed was more plants. The search redesign seems to give less options and the horizontal picture format doesnt make sense unless you can view horizontally on the device. Currently it doesnt rotate. I liked the old list view better for my smaller iPhone screen in general. I give all this feedback to be helpful. You all should be able to see the breakdown of device usage by you current users. If i am a fluke you might ignore the iPhone users but just leave the old design for us and introduce the new one as iPad only. It I an not a fluke then you need a major redefine. You got mislead by you app developer on this one.

Not sure what the other reviewers have been talking about, this runs fine and looks beautiful on my iphone4. Love the interface upgrade. Love the new plants. And Steve’s info is solid. OK so there are a couple crashes but there’ve been several updates in the last month so it seems like the developers are on it. Totally worth what I paid for it I take this on all my walks.

I was referred to the application by a friend and can safely say that it was a great purchase. The recent update was well planned and thought through. I am unsure about the previous reviews regarding the version - but I got past the disclaimer screen without the problem on my 5S. The one caveat I have are the image sizes. The application does take up a fair amount of space. I would be willing to have lower quality images for the app if it took up less space.