What’s new in Indigene

Before · After

Added

• All of France is covered now, not just the rainy west. Three more parts of the country have their own plant lists, each a genuinely different set of plants rather than the same list shuffled: the Mediterranean south (Provence, the Languedoc coast and Corsica — holm oak, strawberry tree, mastic, cistus, thyme and lavender, where the hard part of the year is the dry summer, not the winter), the continental east (Burgundy, Lorraine, Alsace and the Rhône — oak, beech, hornbeam, lime, hawthorn and the chalk-meadow flowers that most French butterflies grow up on), and the Alps (spruce, larch, arolla pine, bilberry, alpenrose and gentian, for gardens high enough to have real snow). Stand anywhere in mainland France and the app will now know which of the four lists is yours. The Pyrenees are deliberately left out for now: they're a different set of plants again, and we'd rather say "not yet" than guess.
• A lot more to plant in the Pacific Northwest. The west-of-the-Cascades list grows from 24 plants to 44 — red alder, bitter cherry, vine maple, western hemlock, Oregon ash and Pacific dogwood among the trees; salmonberry, red elderberry, evergreen huckleberry, ninebark, twinberry and hazelnut among the shrubs; and, for the first time in this region, a milkweed — showy milkweed, the only thing a monarch caterpillar can eat, and the western monarch badly needs more of it.
• Twenty new creatures on the wildlife pages, most of them European, so browsing by animal now works for France too. Some of the best stories in the whole app are in here: the large blue, whose caterpillar eats wild thyme for a few weeks and then gets carried into an ants' nest, where it spends ten months eating the ants' own young; the spotted nutcracker, which buries tens of thousands of pine seeds each autumn and plants the next Alpine forest with the ones it forgets; and the two-tailed pasha, Europe's biggest butterfly, which can raise its young on one plant only.
• Every release now has a page of its own. The What's new page is one long list, which made "look at what just shipped" impossible to share — you could only send someone the whole page and tell them where to scroll. Now each release also lives at its own address, like Version 0.12: tap a release's title to open it on its own, with a link back to all releases and links on to the ones either side of it. The address stays put as new releases pile up on top.
• Indigene now reaches its first place outside the United States: the mild, rainy Atlantic west and north of France — Paris, Nantes, Bordeaux, Rennes, Lille and the countryside between. Stand in a spot there and you'll get native French plants — oak and hawthorn, blackthorn and hazel, woodland bluebells, honeysuckle and foxgloves — ranked for your exact spot, each with what it does for local birds, bees and butterflies. It's a carefully chosen starter list that will grow — and the Mediterranean south, the Alps and eastern France have since landed alongside it (see above), so the whole of mainland France is covered. (The app itself still speaks English for now — French wording is the next step.)
• The app now understands Europe's natural regions, not only North America's. Online, it checks the official European map of biogeographical regions — Atlantic, Continental, Alpine, Mediterranean — to tell whether a French spot is in the Atlantic zone this first list is really for, and says so plainly when it isn't yet.
• 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.
• A page that shows our working. Where our numbers come from lays out, in plain words, where every figure in Indigene actually comes from — and marks each one as counted from real data, worked out by the app, or our own estimate. It also says what we're assuming, and names the numbers we think are most likely to be wrong, starting with the 0–100 scores, which are judgments we made rather than anything anyone measured. If you spot a mistake, the page tells you how to tell us. We'd rather be corrected than believed.

Changed

• Explore now leads with places, not paragraphs. It used to open with five plant descriptions, which meant reading a lot before you got to the one thing you actually have to choose: where you are. Each card is now a region — its name, the part of the country it's tuned to, one native starring on the front of it, and three small figures for what the list adds up to. The whole card takes you to that region's plants. The full description of the starring plant lives on the plant's own page, one tap away, which is where it belonged.
• "Or browse by wildlife" has moved below the list of regions. It's a good way in, but it was being offered before anyone had a chance to look at what was behind the first door.
• Explore, the wildlife list and each region's plant list now use a big screen properly. On a laptop they were a phone-shaped ribbon down the middle with empty space either side; now the cards spread into columns, so you see a whole group at a glance instead of scrolling past one card at a time. Sentences keep their comfortable reading width — it's the cards that wanted the room.
• The USDA hardiness zone is its own little badge now, instead of trailing along in brackets after the place. "Pennsylvania (USDA zones 6b–7a)" is now "Pennsylvania" with a small USDA 6b–7a tag beside it — shorter, and the number is easy to spot because it's the one thing on the line that looks like a label. Hover or tap-and-hold it and it explains what the zone means; on the French regions it also says that American zones are a translation there rather than the local way of talking about winter cold. The reference places got shorter too, so they all read as a couple of city names rather than a paragraph — and on a big screen, where the region cards sit side by side, the tags line up in a neat column down the right of each card instead of landing in a different spot on every one.
• The little counts on each card sit at the bottom now, always in the same place. They used to follow the text, so they landed at a different height on every card and you had to hunt for them. They're also shorter — an icon and a number rather than a spelled-out label, which stops them wrapping onto two lines on a phone. Hover or tap-and-hold any of them to read what it means.
• The French caterpillar counts are now counted, not estimated. Every Atlantic France plant shipped with an honest guess at how many kinds of caterpillar it feeds, because no European tally was available to us. One is now — an open dataset covering 5,152 European butterflies and moths — so the guesses are gone and every plant carries a real figure, with the source named on its page. Almost all of them went up: the guesses had been cautious. Blackthorn and wild cherry turned out to feed 318 kinds of caterpillar rather than the 100 and 120 we'd estimated, and cowslip 35 rather than 6. A few went the other way — holly feeds 7, not the 12 we'd guessed. Because these numbers help decide which plants we recommend first, some French results are now in a different order, and we think a fairer one.
• "Where our numbers come from" is easier to read, and says "calculated" instead of "worked out". The page that tells you how sure we are used to be one long list where every line ended in a little capsule — COUNTED, WORKED OUT, OUR ESTIMATE — so you had to read eleven capsules to work out which numbers were solid. Now the numbers are sorted into three groups under plain headings — Counted, Calculated, Estimated — firmest first, with one sentence under each heading saying what it means. You can see at a glance that most of what the app tells you was counted by somebody, and that the 0–100 scores are our own judgment. "Worked out" is gone: the honest word is calculated, meaning the app does the sum itself from measured numbers, using a method someone else published, so you could redo it on paper and get what we got.

Fixed

• The menu at the top of the app no longer spills onto a second line. On many phones the row of links — Explore, Search, Wildlife, and the bookmark — had grown just wide enough to drop below the Indigene name, making the green bar taller than it needed to be. The links now sit tidily on one line again, from small phones up.
• Tapping "Explore" or "Wildlife" at the top of the screen now always takes you to the top of that page. Two things were wrong: the page could end up nudged down by about the height of the green bar, and tapping the name of the section you were already in did nothing at all — so if you were halfway down the wildlife list and tapped "Wildlife" hoping to get back to the top, you stayed put.

Before · After

Added

• See the wildlife near you. Every creature in the wildlife browser — the monarch, the luna moth, the gopher tortoise — now has a "See it near you" section. Share your location or just type a ZIP code, and Indigene pulls real, community-verified photos of that animal spotted near there, or you can look it up in a region where it's found without being there. The photos come live from iNaturalist, called by your own browser, and each one is credited to the person who took it — the same way the plant pages already show a plant growing near you. (Some entries are broad groups, like "Jays, turkeys & woodpeckers," that don't point at a single species; those don't offer the lookup.)
• Don't want to share your exact location? Type a ZIP code instead. Both "See it near you" (on wildlife pages) and "See it growing near you" (on plant pages) now offer sharing your location and entering a ZIP code (or town) as two equal choices — so you can see what's growing and flying near a place without handing over precise location, and it works the same on a desktop with no GPS.
• A Privacy & safety page, in plain words for everyone — including kids and the grown-ups looking out for them. It lays out the whole story: no account, no tracking, no ads; your saved spots stay on your device; your location is used only when you tap, and you can always type a ZIP code instead of sharing it; and exactly which public science services your browser talks to, and what each is told. Reach it from the footer on any page, and from a short "🔒 …" note right where the app asks for your location or saves a spot. See it at Privacy & safety.
• Every region's page now opens with the same kind of at-a-glance number tiles a plant's page has: how many native plants are on the list, how many kinds of caterpillars its best plant can feed (up to 511 species on white oak alone in the Mid-Atlantic), how many kinds of wildlife we can tie to the list by name, and how many keystone plants it holds. Tap any tile for a plain-words explanation of what the number means and where it comes from.
• A filter box on region pages: start typing a name — common or scientific — and the plant list narrows as you type, no more hunting through 40 rows or bouncing out to the search page.
• The category buttons on region pages (Trees, Shrubs, Ferns…) now each carry their little plant silhouette, matching the drawings on the plant rows below.

Changed

• One tap now takes you through every sighting's photos, not just one person's. When a plant or animal page finds several sightings near you, the photo viewer used to stop at the edge of the sighting you tapped — to see the next person's pictures you had to close it and start again. Now the arrows (and the ← → keys) carry straight on into the next sighting, all the way through everything on the page. It always tells you where you are — "9 / 11 · sighting 3 of 4" — and as you cross from one sighting to the next, the credit underneath changes with it: the new photographer's name, their licence, where and when they saw it, and a link to that sighting on iNaturalist.
• Bigger, tidier photo thumbnails. A sighting's little square photos now sit three to a row and fill the width of the card, instead of being a fixed small size that left a lonely fourth picture stranded on a second row. When a sighting has more pictures than fit, the last one wears a small "+2" badge — tap it and the viewer will page through all of them.
• Opening a sighting photo is smoother now. The photo viewer that pops up when you tap an iNaturalist picture (on a plant's or an animal's page) used to open small, then jump taller and draw the photo in stuttery strips as it arrived. Now the viewer opens at its full size right away, shows a small spinning circle while the photo travels, and the finished picture fades in gently. The link back to the original sighting on iNaturalist is now a quiet underlined link under the photographer's credit instead of a big button.
• Region pages now lead with just the region's name — "Mid-Atlantic / Northeast Piedmont" instead of "Every native we know for Mid-Atlantic / Northeast Piedmont" — and say the rest in one short line underneath.
• The showcase cards on Meet the natives are more compact: the keystone mark now sits beside the plant's name as a small arch, and "Full profile →" tucks in at the end of the description instead of taking a line of its own.
• The fine print about what "native" means on a region's page is shorter and plainer: native here means native to this region specifically — outside it, treat the picks as untested.
• 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 — "Don't want to use your location? Use a ZIP code or pick a region instead." — swaps in the town search or the region list when you ask for it, with a matching link to switch back. Less to scroll past, and the Next button 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.

Added

• A public What's new page: every release of Indigene described in plain words, newest first. Nothing to install, no account — it's just a web page you can share.
• A "See what's new" link in the app's footer, so the notes are one tap away.
• Each release on the What's new page can now show a small picture of what changed, taken when the change was made. Tap it to see the full-size screenshot; Before and After links sit underneath when both exist.

Changed

• The footer — the fine print about open source and data sources, plus the "See what's new" link — now appears at the bottom of every page, not just the home screen.
• The little person standing beside each plant in the growth chart now looks like a person — head, shoulders, arms and legs — instead of a featureless post, at every size from towering oak to knee-high wildflower.
• The growth chart's labels are a touch bigger and drawn in the page's strongest text color, so the feet markings and year captions are easy to read in both light and dark mode — even in bright sun.
• When you search for a plant, each result now underlines the part of its name that matches what you typed, so you can see at a glance why it showed up. And when a plant matched through a name it's less commonly known by — like "Maypop" for Purple Passionflower — the result now says so with an "Also called" line.
• The What's new page now uses the changelog's own headings — Added, Changed, Fixed — instead of renaming them.
• Release notes now link to the things they describe — like the wildlife browser — so you can go straight from reading about a feature to trying it.

Fixed

• The home page could come up completely blank — most often in Safari, and especially with an older Indigene tab still open in another window. The app was waiting forever for its on-device storage to answer before showing anything. It now draws the page right away and fills in your saved spots once storage responds.
• The page now appears instantly on every load — the brief pause some browsers still showed is gone, because nothing waits on on-device storage before drawing anymore.
• 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.
• "See it growing near you" could get stuck at "Asking iNaturalist…" for the same reason — the app checks its on-device photo cache before asking, and that check could hang forever. It now gives the cache a couple of seconds, then asks iNaturalist directly.
• The bottom row of the growth chart's labels — like "(5′6″)" under the little person — was getting cut off by the caption below. The chart now leaves proper room for both label rows.
• The growth chart could be drawn with the wrong colors — pale, hard-to-read labels on a light page — if your device switched between light and dark looks after the page loaded. The chart now redraws itself when that happens, and also when the screen size changes.
• The app's top menu now wraps onto a second line when it truly runs out of room — like with very large text settings — instead of quietly spilling off the edge of the screen, where the Saved button could end up out of reach.

Before · After

Added

• A Browse page of its own: the regions we cover and "start from a plant" now live one tap from the home page — for anyone who'd rather look around without sharing their location.

Changed

• Almost nothing hides behind a tap anymore. A plant's ecosystem, propagation, and reference sections, the 60-second soil check, the sky-scan explanation, and each result's score breakdown are now simply visible on the page. The only fold-away panels left are the two big ones on results — "What matters most?" and "Filters" — and those now have clear Open/Close buttons.
• The home page gets to the point: the pitch, why native plants matter (in plain view, no tap needed), the Start button, and a quiet link to browsing.
• Words got shorter and warmer across the home page, including the promise that matters most: "No account, no tracking. Everything stays in your browser and works offline."

Fixed

• Buttons on phones now keep their labels on one line — like "See it growing near me" and "Check my location" — so they never break in half or shift while you're reaching for them.

Before · After

Added

• Real photos of recommended plants growing near you, taken by people in your area and shared on iNaturalist. Open a plant's page and tap "See it growing near you" — nothing loads until you ask.
• 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.
• Photos open in a full-screen viewer inside the app, so you can look closely and then get right back to where you were.

Changed

• Nearby photo results only show plants that are truly native around that spot, so a garden escapee never sneaks into your recommendations.
• Every photo credits the person who took it and links back to their original sighting, and only photos their takers chose to share openly are shown.

Before · After

Added

• A built-in plant name book (a registry): every plant Indigene knows has exactly one entry tying together its scientific name, its common names, and its identity in the world's big plant databases.
• A search page: type any name — common or scientific — and Indigene finds the plant, or says honestly when a name could mean more than one plant.
• Plant pages now show references: links to the very same plant at USDA, GBIF, and other authorities, so you can double-check anything we say.
• iNaturalist links now land directly on that exact species' page.

Before · After

Added

• Browse by wildlife: start from a butterfly, moth, bee, bird, or mammal and see which native plants support it — because "which plants bring monarchs?" is often the real question.
• Every plant–animal tie says how the plant helps (caterpillar food, nectar, berries, seeds, or shelter) and how much the animal depends on it — from "this is its only host plant" to "one of many it can use".
• Every wildlife relationship names its source, with links straight to the species record where the source has one.
• Plant pages show the wildlife each plant brings in, with links both ways.

Changed

• You can now cap results by mature height and spread — handy for planting under a window or a power line.
• The header now fits every phone: "Saved" moved into a compact menu, and the app's name is never cut off.
• Relationship tags are one short word each; tap one to read the full meaning.

Fixed

• Wildlife pages got the same comfortable margins as the rest of the app.

Before · After

Changed

• The home page now leads with why native plants matter — what's at stake for birds, butterflies, and clean water — before it explains what the app does, and shows how to ask for your area if it isn't covered yet.
• Every color in the app, in light mode and dark mode, now meets the strictest readability standard there is (WCAG AAA contrast) — so text stays clear in bright sunlight, and for readers whose eyes need more contrast.

Added

• Every plant now has "how to make more of it": plain-words tips for growing new plants from seed, cuttings, or division — free plants for you, your neighbors, and the birds.

Changed

• Every expandable section in the app now looks and works the same way — once you've opened one, you know how to open them all.
• Section titles are shorter and clearer, and the first step is now simply called "Spot".
• You can share a link that opens a specific section of a plant's page, like its propagation tips.

Added

• 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.

Changed

• Place lookups now come from OpenStreetMap, and the app always shows town names, never raw numbers.
• Garden jargon never stands alone: terms like "zone 8b" always come with a plain-words translation and a link to learn more.

Fixed

• 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).

Added

• Explore pages: browse every plant Indigene knows without sharing your location — and every plant, region, and category has its own address you can share with anyone.
• Full plant lists for each region at shareable addresses, with a switcher to hop between regions.
• A stat grid on every plant, like a trading card. Tap any stat to read what it means in plain words.
• The location map now draws real streets from OpenStreetMap (with a simple grid when you're offline).
• Short explanations appear right where a new idea first shows up, so you learn as you go — and growth expectations now come from the data, not guesses.

Changed

• Getting around got easier: section navigation, a way back home from every page, and region links right on the home page.
• The re-sort panel can be closed, the growth chart is right-sized, keystone species wear a little arch icon, and species counts show their sources.
• The GPS map starts one zoom level farther out, so the neighborhood you see is one you recognize.

Added

• Three new regional plant lists: the Pacific Northwest west of the Cascades, north & central Florida, and south Florida & the Keys — and the app picks the right list from where you're standing.
• Regions now follow real ecological boundaries (EPA ecoregions), not straight lines on a map — so a spot just east of the Cascade crest no longer gets the west-side list, and Florida splits where the subtropics truly begin. The confirm screen names the actual ecoregion you're standing in.
• Every plant's naming and classification is backed by named, linkable taxonomy sources.
• Indigene went live on the public web — free to visit in any browser, nothing to install (though you can add it to your home screen).

Added

• 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."
• Every plant shows how big it will really get in 1, 3, 5, and 10 years, drawn to scale beside a person — no surprises a decade later.
• 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.
• A starting list of 40 Mid-Atlantic / Northeast Piedmont natives with real size-over-time and ecosystem numbers.