Sibley Birds 2nd Edition

I have the book and I like it. I thought the app will offer extra search tools and more information and links. The app is just only the photos in the book with less info and bad design.

Audubon app has much more informed descriptions and has several variations of songs, along with diet, nesting habits and egg color, as well as conservation status.

The latest version crashes when scrolling anywhere in the smart search area. Would like to report directly as a bug report, but do not want to use email. Hopefully an update can be pushed out soon. This bug makes the app no use for birds you don’t already have a pretty good idea what they are.

The apps bird sounds quit working recently.

The most recent update broke all audio functionality, please fix ASAP.

Apparently, I’m too late to get the discount on this new app even though I purchased the other. Haven’t used it yet, but I really feel like its a slap in the face to have to buy the new app at full price. I’ll update once I’ve spent time using the new version. So disappointed.

What a disappointment. Pictures are colored wrong, maps are incorrect and mixed up, and it’s slow. Did anyone even check it? It takes one easy look to see how badly plates and maps are messed up. I can only hope an update comes out soon.
Western and yellow footed gull range maps are the same.
Key west quail dove shows they’re in California.
All rare bird maps are empty
Scarlet tanager and ibis are wine colored instead of scarlet
Immature black bellied whistling duck is almost black
And numerous other issues.

Whatever you do don't delete your old Sibley Birds app! A few reasons why you'll use it instead of this ill-considered revision:
1. Range maps now made useless by omission of key (explanations) to colors (denoting year round, breeding, etc.) in range maps anywhere I can find, much less with each map as is customary.
2. No practicable way to import one's painfully noted species list & information from earlier edition.
Vertically split screen is a real pain in the neck as far as I'm concerned. Just adds more complication to finding a species. Mysterious color blocks with equally mysterious letters obscure species names in split screen-- and I can't find a key to whatever information these may have been intended to convey anywhere. Again. Most menu list items lead to long winded expositions not well suited to a phone app field guide -- but just try and find a picture showing common body parts (front, primary feathers, etc)!
In the unlikely event that one would consider another item by this app designer / publisher, THAT information is very easy to find -- right from the menu.

Please fix the sound on this app. It no longer plays bird songs, when your phone is in silent mode. So in order to use it, I have to switch my phone out of silent mode, and I also have to listen to all sorts of other sounds on my phone like text messages coming in or the sound of the phone ringing while I am out in the field. Very annoying.
Please reverted back to the old way where you can play sounds through this app while your phone is in silent mode.

Comprehensive, BUT can’t print information for personal journal when identifying a bird. No response from Sibley or app developer when inquiring about inability to pry. Wouldn’t have purchased this if I had known.

I was hoping for much more of an update to the user interface. It’s almost an identical experience to the old app, which has been somewhat dated for years now. Well, this new “Version 2” is nearly identical in form and function. On top of this, scrolling through the list isn’t smooth - this stuttering appeared on the old app and I just assumed it would have been fixed. Laggy scrolling on 2018 iPad Pro and iPhone Xs is a big disappointment. Glad to see updated taxonomy but this should have been a free update.

This app (realistically more of an update to the first Sibley field guide app despite the fact that is a stand-alone purchase) has nominally, as I remember it, been two or three years in the making. As a result, users of the first edition of the Sibley app were understandably hyped about the promise of what the next edition could offer, drawing an analogy to the improvements offered by the second edition of the Sibley field guide book over the first edition. I purchased the app as soon as it became available and have spent the past 24 hours or so evaluating it. My overall impression so far is that while it is the same good reference platform as the first edition, it does not in fact appear to be the product of multiple years worth of actual development work, and a great many things must be fixed before I can objectively recommend the guide.
Pros: The plates are all classic Sibley works that appear to have been digitized at slightly higher resolution relative to those in the first app. Due to Sibley’s artistic acumen, the plates therefore are quite good at conveying the field marks of the birds they represent. A number of species not included in the first edition are present in this edition, which is nice but to be expected given changes in the avifauna of North America over the past several years. Some of the improvements to the UI are also appreciated, including the addition of a dedicated “comparison” button and the ability to list species by abundance in a given region. The latter tool may prove useful to users with less field experience with the birds in their area.
Cons: I fear this list will be longer than that of the pros.
Perhaps the biggest gripe I have about the new app is the fact that the plates appear to have been taken from the first printing of the second edition Sibley field guide book. This printing is infamous for an error that occurred in the production process that caused some of the plates to turn out extremely saturated and dark (the Scarlet Tanager plate, for instance, shows the male as bordering on purplish-black rather than bright red). This error wasn’t caught until the book was already on store shelves, and a second printing was later issued that corrected for these print errors. My gripe is that this whole print error story occurred three or four years ago, before the first edition of the app stopped receiving updates and work shifted to the second edition, and yet the content developers *still* chose to digitize the plates from the first printing rather than the second. This decision is blatantly inexcusable, given the level of outrage from the community when the errors first appeared in the book. These poorly-printed plates are nonetheless, for better or for worse, part of the app offered for sale here.
My second gripe concerns the quality of the range maps in the app. Most of the maps of species that were part of the first edition of the app look fine to me from a quality standpoint, and indeed look to have been scaled up in resolution relative to those in the first edition. The issue comes from newly generated maps, both for those species that are new to the app and for species whose ranges have changed enough to warrant having their maps redrawn. Frankly, most of these new maps are of very poor quality, and some appear as though they may have been produced in MS Paint rather than in a professional illustration suite. The poor quality of these maps relative to those of other species makes for a very uneven user experience, and speaks to low quality control on the part of the development team.
Thirdly, I feel it necessary to address what feels to me to be a lack of optimization in the UI. Scrolling through the species list on my iPhone X feels slow and jerky, which leads to a frustrating and visually jarring experience. In addition, I experienced periodic hard crashes while paging through species accounts, causing me to lose my place in the app. This is clearly not an issue inherent to long lists of rich media, as apps like iBird do an extremely good job of making the scrolling experience feel smooth and responsive. This would be far and away the easiest gripe of mine to remedy, as it’s a code optimization issue that’s unrelated to the actual app content, but until a fix is made, it nonetheless detracts from the user experience of the app.
Closing remarks:
There was a great deal of potential surrounding this app release, particularly considering the lengthy amount of time that the developers had to work on it prior to release. Unfortunately, while the core of the app is still fairly solid, several major content and usability problems make me unable to recommend it wholeheartedly to anyone looking for a field guide app. I hope the development team is able to smooth out some of these wrinkles in the coming weeks, though I suspect that we will be left with the aforementioned shoddy plates and range maps for the foreseeable future.

I was really excited for this app-especially the feature where you can search by banding code. However they have digitized the first printing of the second edition (the one that Knopf replaced) so the reds are too dark. I guess get it while it’s discounted and hope they update it with the correct illustrations in the future? Wouldn’t be worth it at full price without that.

Seriously.... after all this time, they digitized the wrong plates from the field guide. The reds are a mess. The Scarlet Tanager is BRICK RED! I do like the layout and the expanded number of species covered, but the heart of any field guide are the illustrations.

5e first printing of Sibley’s 2nd edition was infamous for having severe color issues. E.g. the red colors were waaay off - much too dark. (See plate of Scarlet Tanager) This was eventually rectified and a lot of us got free replacements once this was corrected.
Well, guess what, they digitized the WRONG printing for this app! So the color issues have returned!!!! This MUST be fixed!!!