Beautiful, but some drawbacks – Mushroom Guide - North America Review

This app is beautifully done, with each mushroom illustrated and explained. I truly do appreciate the work that has been put into this app, but I wish I hadn’t bought it. As a complete beginner in the study of mushrooms, I have found it a little unhelpful. The app currently showcases 105 species. I live in the Rocky Mountains and hoped it would help me identify some of the fungi I have found recently. While the app does have some mushrooms well known in this region (morels, for example), it didn’t have any of the ones I wanted to identify. So I’m thinking, perhaps, this app focuses on mushrooms from other regions. It mentions “coastal” locations a lot, so perhaps it would be a better fit for people living on the coast. I think it would be extraordinarily helpful if the descriptions of the mushrooms said what regions they can be found in, and possibly even divided them into groups accordingly. The descriptions of the mushrooms also contain a lot of descriptive words that only people advanced in this hobby or study will understand. I fully understand the decision to do this, but it’s not helpful for someone who is just walking through the woods taking pictures of mushrooms and wondering what they’re called. I think the app would be far more helpful to beginners if it simply contained a small glossary section explaining what each term means. That way we could learn the terminology as we go along. In the end, I do believe this is a beautiful little app, and would prove very useful if you are searching for mushrooms in the right regions, if you are well acquainted with the terminology, and/or if you just want to look at some really lovely art. If it were a printed book instead of an app, I would absolutely want to own it for the illustrations alone. But for my specific purposes, I would have been better off putting my money toward a regional mushroom guide book.
Review by TrueRegana1984 on Mushroom Guide - North America.