[codingdave]

I'm not understanding why you say that being purchased by a phone manufacturer would be better - wouldn't the optimal solution be to expose any features from the OS that the app could need, while leaving the app developers their independence?

[xattt]

I’m trying to understand the business model that PlantNet has. Right now, it’s obviously some sort of exploitative data harvesting - hoarding geotagged plant photos to sell to academic researchers, highlighting hotspots for nature tourism, etc.

I was alluding to Apple in my comment, as they are the ones that have a model for their mobile devices being some sort of knowledge lens. They are very easily capable to eat the cost of maintaining the database without resorting to some sort of exploitative business model.

[alainv]

You didn't look very hard[1]. It's a research project funded by grants and donations, and as far as I can tell they give away their databases[2].

[1]: https://plantnet.org/ [2]: http://data.plantnet-project.org/datamanager/_design/dataman...

[xattt]

I tried to look for an explanation of the scope of their project from the FAQ. Since it wasn’t openly included, I assumed it was deliberately omitted.