Flock app's 1,000 hand-painted birds draw users outdoors
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- Keith Hansen, a renowned ornithological illustrator based in Bolinas, California, is hand-painting watercolors of roughly 1,000 bird species recorded from the US and Canada (Hawaiian birds excluded), having finished 420 of them with 584 to go — each illustration can take up to four days.
- Adam Donkin and Bob Stevenson founded Flock after bonding over birding; Donkin formerly led Kindle design at Amazon, while Stevenson spent decades as an art director or producer on more than 50 video games, including early work for Richard Branson's Virgin Games.
- Flock deliberately rejects addictive app conventions: it uses a "high-five" button instead of "likes," a minimalist interface, and a monthly species-sighting leaderboard, and the founders self-funded it "so we would not be bound by anyone's rules," per Stevenson.
- Released on Apple's App Store in early 2025, Flock grew from about 100 users in April to roughly 1,000 by mid-2025 without any marketing, prioritizing commonly-seen species like the American robin in Hansen's illustration queue.
- Stevenson uses AI under Hansen's artistic guidance to create short lifelike animations of each bird — a white-crowned sparrow now darts its head inquisitively, while a great blue heron tiptoes along a bank and lowers its bill to strike.
- Amy Tan, whose pandemic-era bird sketches became The Backyard Bird Chronicles, called Flock "hands down the most beautiful bird app" and said each new sighting makes her illustration "suddenly come to life."
Why it matters: A self-funded team of ex-Amazon and video game veterans has inverted the attention economy — using engagement mechanics to push users outside rather than hook them on screens. Flock's 1,000 hand-painted illustrations (420 complete) form a distinctive aesthetic backbone competitors can't easily replicate, even as its ~1,000-user base has grown without any marketing.
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