Calling all Gardeners and those with an interest in Plants!

I make a free mobile phone app that showcases various Plants, with Latin and English names and descriptions. I think it might be useful to people who love plants and I would love to hear what you think of it. Android: Plants Dictionary - Android Apps on Google Play iPhone: http://bit.ly/PlantsDictionaryiPhone

 

Boring apps, yes. I have exactly zero personal interest in plants, however it appears there is some demand for a niche like this. Out of the apps I have, these 2 (iOS and Android) account for almost half of my revenue, via ads, IAP to remove ads and paid-for "pro" versions of the apps that lack ads.

Image recognition: agreed, even found an API (Clarifai) that might be suitable

The app was initially conceived as a lookup between English and Latin names for plants only, however I have expanded it to include images and descriptions. Further descriptions of the plants are linked in to relevant wiki pages.

From the continued downloads I receive for these apps, I consider it might be worth investing the time to market and improve the quality (and features) of the app

 

My Old-man is a gardener and he suggested it after seeing some of the other apps I make for language learning. Over time this has evolved into its own app and a series of apps of a similar nature (i.e. Birds dictionary, Toys dictionary, House plants dictionary, Cookies Dictionary)

They are all based off the same core app version with specific data sets built-in to "brand" them to different markets.

Data collection is done on my own computer. I use a custom made data harvesting app that uses the wikipedia API to collect Abstracts and images in bulk. These are then baked into the specific app, with links to each page if the user wishes to drill down for more info. This is done in accordance with licensing and T&Cs at wikipedia.

Now the back-end is done, it would be trivial to create a new app of this nature. My process involves finding wiki pages that contain many links of related resources, then scraping each of those pages for content. It would take about 8 hours to create new iOS/Android apps with a new piece of content.

This was my way of testing the market for new profitable niches for apps. However, up until very recently I did almost zero advertising or marketing for the apps. The sole method of advertising was via the search on Google Play or the App Store. Since reading TMF and Unscripted, I've reconsidered that it might be a good idea to move into marketing for my apps, as well as soliciting feedback.

Another idea would be to make the apps more "social" with allowing users to Like and Comment on pages in an app, and ideally allow users to create their own "Dictionaries" that could then be shared to other people.