Cicada Safari Reviews

This is a great idea to track the cicadas and crowd source data for research. However, the execution is not user friendly. You have to take photos through Cicada which, in my opinion, doesn’t seem to be great photo quality. When I try to upload from my camera roll for better picture quality, it says there is no Geotag. Once you finally get a good shot, it seems the photos sit for awhile in “pending approval” status which doesn’t make it much fun for the user. Perhaps they have “favorite” scouts because if you look at the leaderboard, there are folks with thousands of approved photos and I can’t even get a few through. Oh well. I’m still enjoying the cicadas on my own...

Cicada needs to tell people their photos won’t be approved anytime soon due to the large volume of pics being submitted right now during the emergence. After 4 frustrating days of wondering why mine were continuously “Pending Approval,” and no communication from this app Safari, I had to come here to Cicada Store to read reviews (and Cicada developer’s replies) as to why pics weren’t being approved quickly. Apparently it’s the sheer volume of photos being submitted right now and each one has to be looked at by an actual person. Ok, fine, now I get it. But while that’s understandable, do you think Cicada could COMMUNICATE with people when they submit pics, or a message popping up when it’s opened, that there will be major delays right now due to so many photos being submitted at once. It wouldn’t be hard to do that. Please communicate with the users about this, as all it’s doing is annoying everyone and turning people off. Thanks.

I downloaded Cicada thinking that it would actually work, be user friendly, so on and so forth. Rarely do I take the time to give any app a review unless it blows my mind in either direction. Obviously I’m not happy with its performance hence the 2 star rating and my review ( if one wants to call it that). So anyway, even with 4GLTE, Cicada is sluggish and very time consuming to even complete the simplest tasks such as pinpointing my location to share where the critters have been sighted and sharing my photos of them.
If things on here happen to improve where an amended review would be warranted, I’ll be sure to take the time to do so, otherwise I’ll let it stand as written and carry on.
Thank you to all involved and have a wonderful day!

Quote of the day - “It’s definitely better to burn out than fade away”.

That is easy to use and awesome that we can help collect data for the cicadas.

Knocked off two stars because of the following: It looks as though you can take your own video and upload it (which is different than taking video within Cicada ) but so far I have not been able to successfully upload videos.

I have run out of data this month submitting photos and video to this app Safari (I am in the top 200 on the leaderboard), so to continue to contribute I have been taking photos and video and then once I am home uploading them.

The photos upload fine, and it appears as though the videos upload. But when I go to check under the user tab, the videos I uploaded are just blank. They appear as still photos which is frustrating because the videos have sound files that are useful to the researchers.

I also got some great videos of adult cicadas feeding on a persimmon tree, but I can’t seem to upload them. Would be great if this was fixed (or let us know if we are doing it incorrectly).

I have been snapping away AND getting messages that my photos have been approved but they don’t appear on the map add still say, “Pending Approval.” I sent an email and still nothing. It’s been over 5 days since a photo was actually approved and on the map.

I’m assuming millions of cicadas makes for a long approval process but a quick glance should take about 3 minutes to get through the 100 pics.

Cicada is fun. Just wish it worked.

I really liked following and using Cicada during the crazy this app season this Summer 2021! Now I wish the exact same thing would be used…. A mirrored app…. All about sightings and getting counts of the increasingly (beneficial) invasive species… the JORO SPIDER! Please and thanks! 😁

Checking back in. With all the Joro spider on the East Coast talk that is going on, I’d love to see a version of Cicada made for tracking sightings of Joro Spiders as time progresses 2022 and beyond. These things will invade much of the US. Having a reporting system would be amazing!

But it would be nice to have an idea of how long it takes for photos and videos to be approved. I get that folks may have a lot of work going on with this, so perhaps just putting in some additional info in FAQs or something so we know how long to wait. If users feel like their efforts are just going into a void, they will likely stop tracking or find another app to use that’s more “responsive”.

Cicada goes against intuition / UX standards, puts multiple unfortunate and really odd barriers in place, and does a really poor job of explaining its use which should be obvious. The concept was good, the execution was terrible. Really wanted to like it and use it, been waiting to upload pics / share for weeks. Now that it’s time it’s too frustrating to try to use. It’s no surprise IT peeps get primary creative credit — IT doesn’t understand how to blend people with tech, and disregards user experience as superfluous. This is like a WIN95 nightmare. What a shame. Happens once every 17 years … deserved far better.

I’m a devoted this app enthusiast, excited to contribute my photos and videos to the this app Safari app but for the last ten days (since emergence started in NJ on May 15) Cicada has not been accepting or uploading my photos.... they seem to be in limbo, awaiting emergence onto the map! I would love some guidance on how to get my photos approved, or are the developers just too overwhelmed with the Brood X emergence happening right now to fix Cicada ?

This idea is excellent: a user-driven, real-time map view of the great 2021 this app invasion. However, they obviously can’t keep up with the sheer volume of submissions. I have several pictures and videos that never made it out of “pending approval”, and by the sound of other reviews, this is the norm. To be fair, who would have thought that watching bugs would be so popular?

Cicada is nearly unusable because it is so slow. You also have to take photos and videos on-site and through Cicada . I took both with my regular phone camera, not knowing about Cicada . Was hoping I could upload them later when I found out about Cicada but that is not the case. I hope I can find a different way to report the cicadas I found, since I will not be back in the area again.

Definitely not as informative as I thought Cicada would be. I have submitted several pics and video at least a week ago and they are still pending approval. Maybe they are overwhelmed, not sure but how can we track if they aren’t approving the images. Cicada could use some work!

I’m sorry, I know a lot of work has gone into Cicada, but it’s just simply unusable… the map only loads with reported sittings on launch, and once you try to pan-zoom-adjust it goes blank. I know it’s not my data connection because all other sites, including maps, work as they should. I want to know where these bugs are! I want to see them. Yet, haven’t seen one this season. I’ll try to find a better tool to direct me. Maybe I’ve missed the point of Cicada.

Cicada is ok to use. I submitted a number of photos and videos without issue. However, the use of “marker clustering” for the map makes it completely useless. Impossible to tell where the cicadas are being reported.

I understand photosvideos take forever to get approved, but mine never popped up on the map, not even within the 48 hour window after approval, which was disappointing. I hope my photos can be used for study, but the execution of Cicada quickly made me lose interest. So, although my property is deafening right now with this app screams, I will not be submitting anything else.

I signed up this morning. Found my tree with five this app skins. My local news said that no one has sighted any so far in my town.
I can’t access. The main page the button to hit after logo ing in my information is too small and can’t move the screen to login. I deleted Cicada and reinstalled made new password w same email. I can’t hit the button again to sign up.

Gave app permissions to access microphone and camera. App is not properly asking for permission to use the microphone. App message says it can’t access my camera and microphone.

I like being able to take pictures that help with the university’s research, but whenever my photo is approved or declined, it sends me around three of the same notifications per photo. Also, many of my photos that obviously have cicadas in them were declined.

Cicada worked fine until the recent update. I have reset my password 3 times and it never works. I can’t log in.

Is there anyway I can download onto my iphone or to Photos the videos that I post with Cicada? They seem to be lost once recorded with Cicada .

Cicada is severely janky right now. Even just opening Cicada reveals poor design on a modern iPhone 12 Pro, with icons smooshed to the very bottom of the screen. Uploading photos from Cicada seems broken. I attempted to upload one just this evening and couldn’t. It just spun and spun. Not sure what the process looks like after that. Can I tag the photos? Add metadata like notes, date, time, and location? I don’t know because I can’t get past photo uploads.

I’m very excited to start seeing more photos and info pop up over this spring and summer, but it makes me sad to think of how many people aren’t going to use Cicada after running into such a subpar experience on their first attempt. Hopefully it gets better over the next few weeks because time is running out. I’ve already started to see this app holes appearing everywhere.

Very informative. I like the idea of knowing when the Cicadas are getting close to my area. Cicada has a few shortcomings. Though we are told Cicadas are arriving in our area in mid May, photos have already been posted here on the map. I see no way to determine the date the photo was taken. Also when I select a photo, I’m taken to a black page. Lastly, the back arrow is very temperamental. Good effort though.

Cicada is pretty intuitive to use. I’m excited to see where all the this app broods will emerge from on the interactive map feature!

Cicada makes you put in your birthday to create an account and I have tried multiple times with various combinations including date first, full year, last two digits of year, etc and none of them are registering as valid. So Cicada has been rendered useless.

It will not accept birthday in mmddyy or mmddyyyy format. What a let down.

It’s nice, it’s simple to use, and it’s informative. Even though I can’t wait until these buggers go back to where they came from I do admit to being fascinated by them. I tried entering my location from a remote location but Cicada insisted on using my phone’s location services and wouldn’t let me edit it. I did post a photo from that same location so I hope they use photo data before placing my this app on the map. Nice that they review things before posting them. One last thing. I have not found a way to contact anyone about Cicada . That would be a nice feature to add if it doesn’t already exist in Cicada . Otherwise, thanks to the developers for such a neat and timely app that I can use and also share with my primary school age grandkids.

Signed in through my Facebook and had no issues with creating an account ! Super easy to navigate, gives lots of information on the types of cicadas you’ll be seeing and if they’re been spotted in surrounding areas. You can even add pictures and videos of the ones you’ve spotted to see how they compare in different cities. Where I live we don’t get them often so it’s neat to see them being tracked and see where they pop up. Will be interesting to see them once they have their large emergence.

In the the next update, the this app photos should have the date of the picture when it was taken (not when uploaded). also it says I don’t have geotag when I upload my photo, even though I do, please fix this.

One more thing, what if someone takes a photo of a this app on vacation and then uploads it at home

The only problem i am having so far, is that when I go to maps, I can’t see other users pictures up close. I can see them when I initially click on the spot on the map, but not when I go to take a closer look.

Tried to report a this app, but it wouldn’t accept any photos that are not geotagged, so I couldn’t use any of my photos. Hard to navigate app, not intuitive or clear where to upload a photo, and when I eventually found the right option, it rejected my photos for lack of a geotag. I take a lot of wildlife photos and do not use geotagging to protect the species (especially reptiles and plants) from poaching.

I uploaded 7 photos of cicadas I spotted over the course of 5 days and not one has shown up on the map yet. So the “current sightings” map must not be very current if it’s that slow to update. It’s very frustrating seeing sightings added to the map and feeling like you’re not able to participate. Time will tell if my photos are ever added. 5+ days is way to slow IMO.

I loved going this app hunting when I was little with my dad! So many happy memories. This is so nostalgic and makes it so much easier. I love when technology helps get kids outside more and this will be a really fun experience for my nieces and nephews!

Cicada is interesting and has fun interactive tools! I can’t wait until my first this app citing so I can upload a picture to help track this unusual insect and it’s emergence where I live. Thank you to the creators behind this amazing app!😊

Trying to upload photos but keeps saying there’s no geotag. I can see the geotag when I look at properties of the photo elsewhere

I am an avid fan of the this app. So many sub species, so many gene mutations blue eyes, white wings it’s endless amazement! Getting to see all the cicadas people are finding around the USA is just mesmerizing. I recommend it to all my bug living friends.