> iNat’s current Leadership does not share this belief. To them, Seek is an off-brand liability that they don’t intend to improve. They think iNaturalist the product can serve those Seek users while also serving existing core iNat contributors to the detriment of neither.
I am a big iNaturalist user and I think the seek/iNat is confusing and a missed opportunity. Seek feels very much like a feature of iNat that is its own app for some reason. They could just make the seek app the iNat landing page and call it a day. I'm not sure how this makes the iNat app worse than it already is. I already find it a chore to use for making observations and finding out about what's around me. It's too clunky to make observations in the app itself, so I always do it after I am out of the field anyway.
Imo they should make mobile app more focused on consuming and visualizing data rather than posting observations. Seek does this for accessing identification data but I think they have a big opportunity to do similar things for seeing whats around you, identifying other's observations, and viewing trends in your own observations.
inat also has terrible performance, with slow loading photos and thumbnails. I would probably spend 10x more time on the app and make 50x more indemnifications than I do now if photos loaded faster.
You hit the nail on the head. The separate “power user” interface is the web app on a desktop.