Which Deer Hunting App Actually Works? Ask It One Question

Every week another app says it can predict deer movement. Ask each one the same question: what did it call before the hunt, and how many of those held?

That question sorts the field faster than any feature list, and here is why.

Building a hunting app got cheap. Weather feeds, moon tables, public maps and a movement score can be stitched together fast, and the screenshots all end up looking about the same. So the app store fills with products that sound alike, and every one of them has a highlight reel.

A highlight reel is not a record. Any app can show you the buck that walked in on the good evening. What it will not show you, unless it was built to, is the evening it sent you to a stand and nothing came, or the morning it said stay home and the neighbor shot a good one. The hits get posted and the misses never do.

So ask for the calls made before the hunt. A prediction only counts if it was written down before anybody knew how the sit would go, because that is the only kind that can turn out wrong. An explanation after the fact costs nothing. Every app is right in hindsight.

Then ask how it gets graded. What counts as a hit, what counts as a miss, who decided, and when. If the grading rules get written after the season, they can be bent to fit whatever happened. If they were written before, they cannot.

It also helps to ask whether the app makes a call you could grade at all. A layer, a score or a good-day rating can never be wrong, so it can never be checked. A call says hunt it or save it, which stand, and when. That can be checked against what walked by.

Last, ask what it does when it does not know. A read that goes quiet when the data is thin is worth more than one that always has an answer. Always having an answer is the easiest thing in the world to build.

Here is where RackIQ™ stands, since the question applies to us too. We wrote down how we would be graded on August 17, before the season, timestamped it, and publish the result on April 1 either way. A record like that has to start before opening day, so nobody can backfill it this year. It is our first scored season, so there is no accuracy number yet, and we will not make one up. The grading rules are on the Record.

Use the question on every app on your phone, ours included. The ones worth keeping will not mind being asked.

What prediction is honestly good for is its own question, taken up in can an app predict deer movement?. The side-by-side comparisons are in How to Choose a Deer Hunting App.