BirdUp 1.6 — Sound ID early access, a new Social tab, and smoother logging

Every birder knows the moment: something is calling ten metres away, clear as anything, and you cannot see it. 1.6 is for that moment. Sound ID — bird identification by call, running entirely on your phone — arrives as an early-access feature, alongside a new home for competitions and a logging flow with less guesswork in it.

Sound ID: name the bird you can't see (early access)

• Record a call, get an identification. Open Listen, point your phone towards the sound, and watch suggestions appear while you record — a kookaburra winding up is hard to miss, but Sound ID is for the callers that never break cover. Review the match, check it against the field guide, and log it if you agree. You're still the birder; the app is a second opinion.
• It all happens on your phone. Identification runs on the device itself — nothing is uploaded, and nothing waits on reception. It works in exactly the places birds are: national parks, gullies, anywhere your signal bar is empty.
• It's early access, and we mean it. This is our first pass and we're still tuning it, so Sound ID is opt-in for now — turn it on under Labs in Settings. Expect the occasional odd suggestion, and tell us when you get one. That's how it gets better.

Competitions get their own tab

• A new Social tab. We said social birding was next, and here's the first piece: competitions have moved out of their old corner into a dedicated Social tab, so checking a leaderboard no longer means digging for it.
• Settings moved to make room. You'll now find Settings behind the gear icon at the top of your Home screen.

Logging, with less guesswork

• Watch your photos upload. Adding photos to a sighting now shows real progress as each one goes up — no more logging a Splendid Fairy-wren and wondering whether the photo actually made it.
• A proper "saved". When a sighting lands on your list, you get a quick confirmation with a little bounce. Small thing. Feels right.

Help keep BirdUp accurate

• Flag a likelihood rating that looks wrong. If Nearby reckons a species is a long shot and you've watched it at that spot every winter for a decade, tap its likelihood badge, pick a reason, and it comes to us for review — same as sighting reports.

Polish and fixes

• Species photos, restored. We've filled in missing species thumbnails and repaired old broken image links, so the field guide no longer has grey squares where birds should be.
• Photo sync copes with missing files. If a photo was removed from your phone before it finished syncing, the app now handles it cleanly instead of quietly getting stuck.
• Nearby ratings stay fresh. Likelihood ratings now refresh properly after we recalibrate them behind the scenes, so what you see matches the current data.
• Plus a round of reliability work under the hood.

What's next

Sound ID rolls out more widely as we tune it. Beyond that: field marks across the guide, richer habitat intelligence, and more for events and social birding. If there's something you'd like us to prioritise, let us know.