Last updated: 28 July 2026
Songbird has no account, no ads and no tracking. The sound of the birds you record never leaves your phone. Identification runs entirely on your device, which is also why the app works with no signal at all.
When you tap to listen, Songbird reads the microphone and turns the audio into a spectrogram, which it matches against a model stored on your phone. The audio is held in memory only for the few seconds needed to do that, and is then discarded. It is never uploaded, never written to a file and never sent to us or anyone else. We do not receive recordings, and there is nothing for us to listen to.
Your life list — every species you have heard, with dates and any notes — is stored only on your device, along with your region choice. We never receive it. You can export it as CSV at any time, and deleting the app deletes it.
Songbird uses your region setting — the country in your iPhone settings — to rank likely species first. It does not use GPS and never asks for location permission. You can change the region by hand in the app.
To download the bird library and to check your subscription, the app signs in anonymously (an anonymous Firebase user ID). It is not linked to your name, email or contacts, and it carries no information about what you have identified.
Songbird Pro can add written notes about a species you have already identified. If you use that feature, only the species name and your question are sent over a secure connection to our backend and our AI provider (fal.ai) to produce the text. No audio is ever involved. The request is processed transiently, is not linked to your identity, and is not used by us to train models.
Subscriptions are processed by Apple. We use RevenueCat to check subscription status against your anonymous ID. We never see your payment details.
Identification uses the Perch bird vocalisation model (Google, Apache 2.0). Species names come from the eBird/Clements taxonomy, descriptions and photographs from Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons — each photograph is credited to its photographer with its licence on the bird's page — and distribution data from GBIF.
Songbird is rated 4+ and does not knowingly collect personal information from children.
You can request deletion of any data associated with your anonymous ID by contacting ilyas.inajjar@gmail.com. EU/UK users: GDPR rights apply (access, rectification, erasure, portability).