> When the app matched his photos of the backyard mushrooms with an edible species, [...] it almost killed him. Now there's an app that'd have to be designed very conscientiously.
However he made the very interesting point that having an app tell you if something is edible is a completely incorrect starting point for foraging because the main thing you get from using a reference book is that you are forced to notice that there are many plants that may look similar but are different (meaning you are more aware that your task is more about differentiation than identification, since botany is a bit fuzzy around the edges) and might seriously differ in their toxicity. None of these apps have a feature to say "it looks like this edible plant but if the angle you took the photo from was slightly off, it's definitely poisonous because the group of plants that look like this only only one or two edible members and everything else will definitely kill you". Some list confidence percentages but there were examples where the percentages were far too pessimistic or optimistic for a certain match, making them not particularly useful.
My impression is that these apps are developed using the same "move fast and break things" model as most other things these days, which definitely seems like the best model to use when making an app that may or may not lead to people's deaths (not your fault of course, because you waived all liability in your ToS). /s