Featured Articles
Article in App of the Week category.
Jungled makes a household task less of a chore
Sigh. Life always seems to get in the way of common tasks. Whether it is running errands you keep putting off, dusting atop those darn…
Sigh. Life always seems to get in the way of common tasks. Whether it is running errands you keep putting off, dusting atop those darn ceiling fans, or remembering when to water those house plants of yours. Jungled is a new app that makes it easy to keep up with that watering schedule, and hopefully stop the systematic neglect that continues to befall your poor succulents. The simple app combines an easy way to identify plants, a schedule creator with smart notifications, and — soon — much more.
Each plant is unique, not only in their appearance, size, and other physical aspects but in their needs. They require different intensities of light, different *duration* of that light, different amounts of water at various frequencies, and different temperatures.
No one has time to catalog this. Well, aside from the developers of Jungled that is.
Jungled starts by asking you to give your first plant a name — something to make it more recognizable and gives you a few suggestions. It then allows you to take a pic of that plant so you can quickly spot it on your list.
Launching the app will show your list of plants which is intelligently sorted based on next
needing watered. It shows you a pic of your plant, its name, what type it is, and when that
watering needs carried out all in the list view.
For each plant you add, Jungled will prepare a bio. This bio includes a description of that species of plant as well as its specific care requirements. It lists the necessary soil moisture, the preferred humidity level, required sunlight, and the minimum and maximum temperature. A watering schedule is also created that will remind you to water your plant at that interval. When multiple plants are added, daily watering will be broken down in your Today tab. Making it easy to manually check your watering schedule or, more conveniently, just to rely on notifications from the app whenever watering needs done.
One of the best features of the app is the ability to identify plants. During the setup of each plant, it is able to take the picture you uploaded to compare to its plant database for what is most similar. While setting it up in our home, it was accurate more often than not. When it shows the list of possible plants, it sorts them based on how similar they are. For example, we took a picture of our aloe plant and it got it identified it straight away.
A smart schedule can only go so far when it comes to plants though. To truly maintain your plants, a sensor is necessary to monitor the moisture level in the soil.
Jungled will soon be releasing a piece of hardware to pair with the app that, while entirely optional, gives you a more accurate direction when it comes to plant maintenance.
The Jungled sensor will measure the moisture level in the soil, the temperature, humidity, and ambient light. It connects over Wi-Fi thanks to USB power.
If, however, you find a sensor useful but don't want to throw down change on one, you can make your own. An upcoming update to the app will not only bring support for the Jungled sensor but for users to create their own. Tinkerers can use a RaspberryPi or Arduino controller to design their own sensors that can link up to the Jungled API for realtime insights into their plant's health.
That "pro" version of the app will also include merchant discounts, home sharing, and a plant recommendation guide based on your climate and care commitment.
Home sharing is of particular use, that way multiple people can be responsible for taking care of the house plants.
Just Enjoy Your Plants
Jungled doesn't have every plant under the sun. Our Majesty Palm for example was left off the existing list of plants, but more plants will constantly be added by the developer and plants can still be manually added as well as scheduled. This is quite useful, even if you have to do that minor bit of legwork yourself to track down how often watering needs done. There are a pile of reasons why people adopt house plants into their home. They can help improve air quality, they add a degree of coziness to a home, and they can make a home look even better.
But they've always come with some level of responsibility. And the more plants, the more attention they all need. Houseplants shouldn't be a constant worry and you shouldn't have to pay for new plants when you inevitably kill off the ones you have around. Hopefully, thanks to Jungled, you can spend more time enjoying your houseplants and less time worrying about how much or when to water them.
But enough about other people's apps.
