Every change
How finding your plants grew, newest first — the same plain notes that go out with each update.
Version 1.1
October 17, 2026- a row of plant-type icons (trees, shrubs, flowers, grasses…) now sits under the name search on your plant list. Tap one to leave that type out, like trees when there's no room for one.
- the soil and climate step shows each fact with an icon (❄️ winter, 🌧️ rain, ⛰️ slope), and dry, evenly moist and wet each get a drawn drop. The one-minute soil check moved to the guide.
- steps you've finished are links, so tapping "Sun" takes you back to change it.
- The location page is shorter and plainer: it says why your spot matters, then how to set the pin.
- The town and postal-code search on the location page now sits right under "Use my location", instead of behind a link. No GPS needed to find your spot.
- on a phone, holding a plant-type square to show only that type no longer selects it as text instead.
- Searching your town on the location page and pressing Next no longer sends you to Pittsburgh's plants. One match is used at once; with several, Next waits until you tap yours.
Version 0.38
October 9, 2026- importing from iNaturalist now reaches back five years instead of one, and only brings in your sightings within 35 km of the spot. iNaturalist is sent the spot rounded to about 1 km, so blurred sightings still turn up.
Version 0.37
October 8, 2026- when you log a plant in a saved spot, you can pick one of your iNaturalist sightings of it. The sighting gets linked, and its date fills in the planting date. You can still type the details yourself.
- you can also start from a sighting before choosing a plant. Tap one of your photos on a saved spot's page and Indigene works out which plant it shows. Check the date, then add it.
- importing from iNaturalist now marks sightings already linked to another spot. A photo of a plant already in the log is added to that entry instead of starting a duplicate.
- on the location map, press and hold to open a magnifier and nudge the pin a few metres at a time. The line under the map now says which way it moved, like "nudged 40 m northeast".
- "I planted one" on a plant's page now always arrives with that plant picked, even when it's from another region's list. The search box steps aside once it's picked, so the form no longer looks empty.
- on iPhone, holding a finger on the location map no longer starts selecting the text around it, so the map moves the way you'd expect.
Version 0.36
October 2, 2026- "Add sighting" on a plant in your saved spot now shows your own iNaturalist photos of that plant. Tap one to add it, no link to paste, so each season's photo lines up under the plant to show how it's growing.
- got a planting date or count wrong? Tap "Edit" beside the date of a plant in your saved spot to fix it, and keep the sightings linked to it.
- a saved spot's page can now rename the spot, or move its pin on the map when it landed next door.
- the buttons on a saved spot say what they do. "Open" is now "Plant more", and the link to what's in the ground reads "Already planted".
Version 0.27
August 28, 2026- The ranked list shows the plants. The plants matched to your spot — and the plants on an animal's page — now carry a photograph beside the name instead of a drawing of a generic shrub, like every other list in the app.
- Your saved spots, as a file you keep. Settings can now write every spot and its planting log to one plain file, and read one back in another browser — so a phone and a laptop can hold the same garden. Take a copy.
- Reading a copy never overwrites anything. Spots you already have are kept as they are, so bringing the same file in twice changes nothing — and a file we can't make sense of is turned away with a reason.
- Spots say where they are in words. "near Radnor, Pennsylvania", and each number now says which it is — "Latitude 40.0379° N" rather than a bare pair with a minus sign in front. The town is remembered when you find the spot.
- Saving a spot offers its town as the name. The box that asks what to call it starts with "Radnor, Pennsylvania" instead of a pair of coordinates — something to accept or edit, not something to replace.
- Two new figures at a glance. A spot's tiles gain the number of creatures its plants can feed, and each row in your saved list carries it too — so a garden's reach shows without opening it.
- A spot's fact boxes lead with the number. Plants, Species, Nurtured, Sustained — one word each, and the figure set large enough to read at arm's length.
- All the little fact boxes are one size now. A label long enough to run onto two lines used to make its box taller than the one beside it and knock the numbers out of line. On spots, plants and regions alike, they line up.
- A planted row says its size in five words. "6.6 ft × 4.6 ft if thriving" in place of the sentence that used to wrap onto a second line, so a plant in your log is one line to read.
- And they're the boxes a saved spot has. Host, Shelter, Vital — one word over a big number, matching your spots. Each word is the one the plants below wear, so you can see which five of eleven the box means.
- Nearly enough sun is no longer a complaint. A plant wanting an hour more sun than your spot gets was told off for it, quoting two numbers that rounded to the same one. It now says it may just not grow as well.
- Your last spot said where it was to the nearest hundred kilometres. Settings rounded the coordinates to whole degrees, so a garden outside Philadelphia read "40, -75". It now keeps the four decimals the saved list already showed.
- Fact boxes stopped cutting their labels short on a big screen. On a laptop a spot's boxes were narrower than the same ones on a phone, so "NURTURED" came out "NURTUR…". Every box now sizes itself to the space it's actually in.
Version 0.26
August 9, 2026- Dates can be as vague as you are. Say the day, the month, or just the year — whatever you actually remember. The log then tells you how long a plant has been in and roughly how big it should be by now, from that plant's own measured growth.
- Photos, without handing us your photos. Paste a sighting you posted on iNaturalist — its link, or the UUID the site copies for you — and every photo on it appears beside that plant. One you obscured there stays obscured; only your device knows the corner of the garden.
- Your saved spots list what's in them. Each spot now shows its tally and a way through to its planting log.
Version 0.19
August 1, 2026- Indigene remembers the spot you were last standing in. Come back tomorrow and it opens where you left off, with the sun and soil answers you gave for it. Move somewhere new and it asks again — those answers belong to that patch of ground.
- A starting region, if you'd rather skip the map for good. If you already know your area, choose it once under Starting region in Settings and every visit begins there.
- The goal you last chose sticks, and now says so. Ask for a list that favours birds and it stays that way next visit. That was always true, but nothing told you, so the order looked like Indigene's own opinion. Settings names it, with one button back.
Version 0.18
July 31, 2026- The "ZIP or town" box is the size of a ZIP or a town again. It used to stretch to fill the line, which on a wide screen meant a box half a window wide waiting for five characters. Unchanged on a phone.
Version 0.16
July 30, 2026- Indigene asks what you want the spot to do, before it shows you plants. A new Goals step sits between the soil question and your list: feed the most wildlife, butterflies & moths, birds, stop erosion, soak up rain, easiest to grow. The order is now something you chose.
- You can see what a slider does while you move it. Open Fine-tune each one and each slider says its setting in words — "counts a lot", "ignore it" — while a panel that follows you down the page names the three plants leading right now.
- Indigene says out loud when it has recalculated — even when nothing moved. Change a goal and a line reports what happened: "Recomputed — Black Cherry now leads", or plainly "the order didn't change". Silence used to leave you guessing which it was.
- Tap any plant in your list to open its full page — and get back where you left it. Every card is now a door to that plant's own page, and "← Back to your plant list" returns you to the plant you tapped, not the top.
- The cards in your plant list are much shorter. Each carries what you need to decide whether to open it: the name, whether it suits your spot, how big it gets, and the two things your goals weighted most. A card used to run two screens tall.
- The plant list is a list again, not a control panel. The ⚖️ sliders panel has moved to the Goals step; in its place a line says what the list was ranked for, with a Change button. Filters stay — they narrow the list rather than reorder it.
Version 0.15
July 30, 2026- Your plant list for a spot has the same "Filter by name…" box. Type "oak", "milkweed", "fern", and the part you typed is underlined in green on each match. It searches the whole ranked list, not just the cards on screen.
- Your plants come sooner on the page. The explanation of how the ranking works used to sit open above the list, so every visit began with five lines about method. It now waits inside What matters most?, where you'd go to change it anyway.
- The buttons on your plant list moved below the plants. "Back" and "Save this spot" used to sit above the list, so the first thing on the page that finally shows your plants was a way to leave it.
Version 0.13
July 29, 2026- Elevation and slope now work anywhere in the world, not just the US: outside the United States the app reads the land's height from a global source, so the new French spots get the same "how high, how steep" reading.
Version 0.12
July 28, 2026- Don't want to share your exact location? Type a ZIP code instead. "See it near you" and "See it growing near you" now offer sharing your location and typing a ZIP code as two equal choices. It works the same on a desktop with no GPS.
- The Where are you standing? step now shows one way of setting your spot at a time. Using your device's location leads, and a small link swaps in the town search or the region list. Less to scroll past, and Next is always close by.
- Picking your region by hand is now two taps: choose a region and the list folds down to just your choice (a "Show all regions" link brings the rest back), then press Next when you're sure — instead of being whisked to the next step the moment you tap.
Version 0.11
July 28, 2026- The Saved menu no longer sticks on "Loading…" when on-device storage won't answer (Safari sometimes leaves it hanging). After a couple of seconds it says it couldn't open your saved spots, suggests closing other Indigene tabs, and offers a Try again button.
Version 0.9
July 27, 2026- Not standing there right now? Tap "Look it up where it's native" and pick a region instead: you'll see photos of the plant from anywhere it naturally grows, no location sharing needed.
Version 0.7
July 21, 2026- You can now cap results by mature height and spread — handy for planting under a window or a power line.
Version 0.5
July 18, 2026- Section titles are shorter and clearer, and the first step is now simply called "Spot".
Version 0.4
July 17, 2026- Type your town or ZIP code instead of sharing your location — or just pick your region from a list. Nobody is ever asked for coordinates.
- If Indigene doesn't have a plant list for a spot yet, it says so the moment you pick it — and shows you what it does cover, plus where to request your area.
- Place lookups now come from OpenStreetMap, and the app always shows town names, never raw numbers.
- The place-search button now sits right beside the search box, at a matching size.
- The map no longer promises that fine-tuning the pin sharpens the sun estimate (it doesn't).
Version 0.3
July 16, 2026- The location map now draws real streets from OpenStreetMap (with a simple grid when you're offline).
- The GPS map starts one zoom level farther out, so the neighborhood you see is one you recognize.
Version 0.1
July 12, 2026- The first version of Indigene. Stand somewhere, share your location, and get native plants that will truly thrive right there — ranked by what they do for birds, butterflies, bees, soil, and water.
- Sun, measured honestly: answer one simple question about your spot's sun, or point your camera at the sky and let the app measure sun-hours itself. The simple question always works; the camera is optional.
- The ground gets checked, not assumed: the app says "the soil map says clay — here's a 60-second hand test to see if that's true where you're standing."
- The ranking is transparent and yours to adjust, with filters for deer resistance, thorns, pet safety, and plants that survive with zero watering.
- Saved spots stay on your phone. The whole app works offline, installs to your home screen, and never asks for an account.