On-device
Plant identification that works with no signal.
Raychis is a plant identification app that works completely offline. The model sits on your phone, so a photo is answered where you took it, in a garden with no bars or a polytunnel with thick plastic walls. Nothing is uploaded, and there is no account to make.
- 5,000 species
- Works in airplane mode
- No photos uploaded
- No account
The model runs on the phone
When you install Raychis, the identification model installs with it. A scan runs against that model on your own hardware rather than a server, so the answer comes back whether or not you have a connection. Turn on airplane mode and identification works as it does online. Shrinking a model far enough to run in your pocket, and keeping it accurate while it shrank, is the subject of the build-in-public series: it starts at the field notes.
Your photos are not uploaded to identify them
A cloud identifier sends your photo to a server and reads the answer back. Raychis does neither. The photo stays on the device, the model reads it there, and the result never involves a round trip. Your saved plants, photos and notes live in the app's own storage on the phone, where no server holds a copy. The one thing that can leave is anonymous crash diagnostics, which you can switch off; theprivacy page and the security pageset out exactly what those contain.
No account, nothing to sign up for
Open the app and identify a plant. There is no login, no email to hand over, no profile to create. The free tier gives you 5identifications a day, a health read in every scan, and unlimited saved plants;Raychis Plus lifts the daily limit. The sign-up wall that other apps put in front of the camera is not there.
What it can identify
The model covers 5,000 species, the same species the app browses and theplant guides cover in depth. It is a curated set of the plants people grow and meet, rather than a claim to know every plant on earth. When a plant falls outside the set, the app would rather say it is unsure than name it wrongly, which is where confidence comes in.
How confidence works
Every identification carries a confidence tier: Strong, Good, Possible or Weak. The tier is the app telling you how far to trust the name it has just given you. A Strong result is one to act on. A Weak one is a prompt to take a clearer photo or to treat the name as a starting point. Why that tier matters more than a single headline percentage is the last field note in the series,The App That Will Tell You It Might Be Wrong.
The trade-offs of working on-device
On-device identification buys privacy and offline use, and it costs some reach. A model small enough to run on a phone knows 5,000 species rather than the tens of thousands a data centre can hold, and it improves when the app updates rather than continuously. Disease and growth-stage detection ship experimental and off by default, because they were not accurate enough to turn on, and Raychis holds a feature back rather than have you act on a confident guess. None of your scans train the model, because none of them are collected. These are deliberate trades, and they are what makes the privacy and offline claims above hold. The rule behind shipping only what was ready is its own field note,The Stage Gate.
Common questions
- Does Raychis need an internet connection to identify a plant?
- No. The identification model is on the device, so a scan runs on your own phone and works in airplane mode and in places with no signal.
- Are my photos uploaded to identify them?
- No. Identification happens on the phone. Your photos, saved plants and notes stay in the app storage on the device, and no server holds a copy of them.
- Do I need an account?
- No. There is no login and no email to hand over. The free tier works the moment you open the app.
- How many plants can it identify?
- The model covers 5,000 species, the same set the app lets you browse and the plant guides cover in depth.
- Is it free?
- The core is free, with 5 identifications a day and a health read in every scan. Raychis Plus lifts the daily limit.
Take it to the garden.
Free to download. Identification, a health read and a year of care, all on your phone.