Musgo

Houseplants

Musgo keeps track of the plants in your home.

What each one is, and when it needs watering and fertilizing. Photograph a plant and Musgo works out what it might be; you say which one it is. After that the schedule runs on your phone, with or without a signal.

  • No account
  • No tracking
  • Works offline

Musgo is being tested with a small group of people. There is nothing to sign up for.

How it works

You photograph it. Musgo keeps the dates.

A photograph, and a guess you confirm

Musgo shows you what it thinks your plant might be, and you say which one it is. Until you do, nothing about the plant changes. If you would rather not photograph it, the name you know it by will do — or nothing at all, and you tell Musgo how to care for it yourself.

A schedule measured from what you did

Watering, feeding, and deciding the soil is still damp are all recorded. The next date is worked out from the last thing that actually happened, never from the calendar — so a plant watered two days early is simply due two days later.

One reminder a day

A single notification each morning listing the plants that need you that day — never one per plant, and never more than twice about the same one. Your phone schedules it, so nothing is pushed from a server.

Through the year

Plants drink less in winter.

Musgo leaves about half again as long between waterings through the colder half of the year, and works out which half that is from your phone’s time zone rather than from where you are.

Plants that should not be fed while they are resting are not fed. Feeding a dormant plant harms it rather than merely being unnecessary, so for those months the feeding stops and the next one waits for the end of them.

One year. Each dot on the ring is a watering, each tick outside it a feeding.

Privacy

There is no account.

Musgo never asks for an email address, a name, a password or a phone number. The first time you open it, the app makes an anonymous identity for itself — a random identifier, connected to nothing about you.

Your plants, their schedules and your photographs are stored on the phone itself, and every screen reads that copy. A photograph leaves the phone only when you ask Musgo to identify a plant.

All of it, in full, in the privacy policy

  • No advertising, and no advertising identifier is read.
  • No analytics, no tracking, no usage measurement.
  • No crash reporting.
  • No location. Musgo works out roughly which hemisphere you are in from your phone’s time zone setting, and that happens on the phone.
  • Nothing is sold, rented, or shared with anyone for their own purposes.

Keeping it

The one thing Musgo asks you to keep

Since there is no email and no password, an identity lives on one phone. A recovery key is what carries your collection to the next one. Musgo keeps only a scrambled copy of it, which means nobody at Musgo can look yours up — and that if you lose it, your plants cannot be brought back. The app says so, rather than finding out later.