Most rock ID apps hand you a name and hide the reasoning — which is exactly the part you'd need in order to disagree. RockID marks the evidence on your own photo, walks you through it one feature at a time, and tells you what it ruled out.
Not a label. A read of the specimen, with the parts of the photo it was reading pointed out, so you can check the reasoning against the rock in your hand.
Each finding is pinned to the spot on the rock that supports it — the pink feldspar, the quartz vein, the rounding, the bedding. Drawn as an overlay; your photo is never painted on.
Six labels on a pebble is mush. Fullscreen tour flies the photo to one feature at a time, dims the rest, and explains it in plain language. Tap, swipe, or let it auto-advance.
Streak, hardness, a drop of vinegar, a hand lens. The checks that separate the answer from its lookalikes — and the lookalikes it ruled out, with the reason.
Locality is the strongest clue in geology. Share the photo's location and RockID brings the regional bedrock into the call — and tells you whether your rock belongs to that ground or was carried in by ice, water or a gravel truck.
Identification runs on the server, not on a held connection. Switch apps, pocket the phone, lose a bar of signal — it buzzes you when your rock is ready.
Cancel actually stops the work, so the next rock starts straight away. A dropped upload keeps your photo, notes and location so one tap resends the lot.
Works one-handed, standing on a beach, in the wind.
Short version: to the server that reads your rock, and nowhere else.
A checkbox before every upload, and a switch in settings that turns the whole thing off. Nothing is read from a photo you didn't send.
There's nothing to sign up for, so there's nothing to leak. No ads and no analytics SDK are in the app.
Your phone's current position is only ever used for a photo you just took. A picture out of the gallery is never stamped with today's coordinates.
RockID runs on a vision model. It is a well-read field companion, not a petrologist and definitely not a lab. It will be confident and wrong sometimes, most often on weathered surfaces, fine-grained rocks, and anything that needs a thin section or a streak plate to settle.
Treat every answer as a starting hypothesis with its reasons attached — which is exactly why the app shows you the evidence and the field tests instead of just the name. Don't buy, sell, or mine anything on its say-so.
Free, and it stays free. If it gets something wrong in your area, I'd genuinely like to know.