What’s on the smartphone agenda for December?

iNaturalist

iNaturalist is a social network for sharing biodiversity information to help each other learn about nature.

The app’s primary goal is to connect people to nature and secondary, is to generate scientifically valuable biodiversity data from these personal encounters.

iNaturalist helps users identify plants and animals with visually similar suggestions, verified by dedicated contributors. Users can take or import a photo, view the top-10 matches of the most similar species and tap through them to get more information.

Moreover, subscribers can create an account to share their observations and connect with a community of experts and naturalists to learn more. By recording and sharing their observations, users can create research-quality data that could help scientists working to better understand and protect nature.

iNaturalist has been translated into dozens of languages thanks to multilingual enthusiasts who want to see the community grow.

Cloaked

As the number of applications we access daily keeps increasing, the risk of our sensitive data being breached is an everpresent concern. Cloaked lets users take control of their data by providing them a personalised, fully-encrypted server that generates unlimited, secure identities in place of personal info.

Cloaked believes that users have the right to privacy and produces unlimited emails, phone numbers, passwords and usernames.

Traditional password managers make saving repeat information for different accounts the norm, which leaves holes in users’ privacy and security that can then grant easy access to hackers. But Cloaked saves users’ identities with unique information, so logins are easy but the information is diverse and virtually impossible to identify.

The app’s zero access architecture means that users’ data is encrypted on their side using an encryption key that even Cloaked does not have access to.