About Warble

Warble is a free iPhone game that identifies the birds singing around you by their song and turns each species into a collectible card. It covers 800 North American birds with an album for every US state, works offline, and keeps all sound on the phone.

Why a game

Most people who hear a beautiful song outside never find out who sang it. Field guides assume you saw the bird; sound apps assume you want a spreadsheet. Warble assumes you want a reason to go back outside tomorrow. So every identification becomes a card, every card has a rarity, every state has an album to fill, and the app cheers when you catch something good.

How the identification works, in plain words

When you tap the green button, the phone records a short stretch of sound and compares it, on the device, against what 800 North American birds sound like. When one species stands out clearly, the card flips. When the app is not sure, it says so and shows you its best guesses rather than pretending. The comparison happens entirely on the phone: nothing is uploaded, which is also why it works with no signal.

Where the birds, art and sounds come from

• The 800 species are birds recorded in the United States, named after the eBird/Clements checklist used by ornithologists.
• State albums and rarities come from millions of public observations aggregated by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). Each state's 100 most-reported birds form its album, and how often each one is reported sets its rarity: common, uncommon, rare or legendary.
• The card art is original illustration made for Warble.
• The recordings on this website were shared by their recordists under Creative Commons licenses, mostly through iNaturalist, and each page credits the person who made it.

Privacy

Sound is analyzed on your phone and never leaves it. Location is optional, used only to suggest your state album, and stored as an approximate area rather than exact coordinates. There are no accounts, no ads and no third-party tracking inside the app. The full policy is at warble-legal-app.netlify.app/privacy.

Free and Pro

Warble is free to download and free to play with one catch a day. Warble Pro removes the limit for $3.99 a week or $19.99 a year, billed through the App Store and cancellable anytime in your Apple account settings.

Say hello

Bug, idea, or a bird that fooled the app? Write through the support page. Reviews on the App Store help more than you would think.