Catch ’em
in the Wild
Photograph a real animal and it becomes a card you keep — named, dated, and pinned to where you found it. Your phone does the identifying, with or without a signal.
to fill
Free on iPhone and Android · iOS 16+ · Android 8.0+
Point, catch, keep.
Then go find the next one.
Every catch becomes an entry
One canonical entry per species, numbered in the order you found them. Browse as a list or a wall of cards, filter to what you have actually caught, and watch the gaps close.
Your city is the board
RealDex reads the real boundary of the city you are standing in and builds a fixed roster for it. Fill the roster to stamp the city. Catches only count inside the border — which is the point.
1,038 families to fill
Not a marketing number — it is the length of the family index the app ships with. Every family carries a real count: 121 ducks and geese, 118 hawks and eagles, 286 colubrids.
A record that keeps score
Ranks, experience, daily expeditions, and a 98-entry Field Record of Grand Honors, Honors and Field Marks. The collection is the point; this is what keeps you walking.
It runs on the phone
in your hand.
No round trip to a server to tell you what a sparrow is. The model ships with the app, the collection stays on the device, and the whole thing works in a field with no reception.
FieldNet 1, the classifier behind RealDex, was trained in-house. It runs on your phone — no request leaves the device to name what you photographed.
Identification checks the model before it checks the network. Deep in a valley with no signal, the camera still works and the catch still saves.
When the model is unsure — or you already know the answer — search the full index yourself and name it by common name.
Your collection lives in a SQLite file on your phone. There is no sign-up, and no server holding a copy of where you have been.
Every card carries
its status.
Each species is stamped with its IUCN Red List status, pulled from real assessment data. Collect long enough and you notice something: the rarest things on your list are rare everywhere.
The honest answers
RealDex turns a photograph of a real animal into a collectible card. It names the species on your phone, stamps it with the date and its conservation status, pins it to where you found it, and files it in a personal field guide with 1,038 families to fill.
Your first catch is
probably outside.
A pigeon counts. So does the cat on your street. Entry #001 is whatever you point the camera at first.
Free · iOS 16+ · No account, no sign-up