Plants September 2026

5 apps that know your window, not your plant

Most plant apps name the plant and then tell you what a plant of that kind likes. None of that helps if the window is wrong. These five start from the room instead: where the sun actually goes, how much light reaches that shelf, what your climate allows, and whether the thing has moved at all in a month.

The apps that know your window, not your plant are Sun Seeker, Succulent, Light Meter LM-3000, GrowIt and Skyflow. I built Succulent; the other 4 are other developers’ apps.

MiaAppLog— an iOS developer who reviews other people’s apps
Published September 2026 · apps and prices last checked 13 October 2026

Four stars is my score for how well an app answers this moment. An app I built gets four and a half — that is a rule, not a comparison. The App Store’s own average is on each card beside it.

1. 

   Sun Seeker

   ★★★★★★★★★★4.0 · $11.99 · Navigation · App Store 4.8 (12,937)

   Sun Seeker draws the sun's real path over your address in AR: hourly positions plus the solstice lines. Hold it to the window and see which shelf gets anything.

   Skip it if you want hours of sun per bed rather than the sun's direction — it draws the path, not the total, and the compass and the satellite imagery are both a step behind.

   Official site ↗More lists with Sun Seeker

   
2. 

   Succulent Editor’s pick

   ★★★★★★★★★★4.5 · Free · Lifestyle · App Store 5.0 (10)

   Succulent gives one page per plant instead of one watering schedule for all of them: what you did, when you did it, and how that same Echeveria looked in spring.

   App Store ↗More lists with Succulent

   
3. 

   Light Meter LM-3000

   ★★★★★★★★★★4.0 · Free · Utilities · App Store 4.5 (2,586)

   Light Meter LM-3000 turns the front camera into a light meter and reads out lux or foot-candles. A number for that exact spot, instead of guessing at "bright indirect".

   Skip it if you expected free and ready to go: it wants a paper diffuser you build yourself, the real price turns up after that, and readings drift on newer phones.

   Official site ↗More lists with Light Meter LM-3000

   
4. 

   GrowIt

   ★★★★★★★★★★4.0 · Free · Lifestyle · App Store 4.7 (14,094)

   GrowIt is a planting calendar built from your zone and climate: when to start seeds, when things go outside, and a heads-up before a freeze arrives.

   Skip it if you are trialling it: charges after cancelling are the complaint that repeats, and the planting features people came for need premium.

   Official site ↗More lists with GrowIt

   
5. 

   Skyflow

   ★★★★★★★★★★4.0 · Free · Photo & Video · App Store 4.6 (599)

   Skyflow is a time-lapse camera with manual control over interval and exposure. Point it at the same shelf for a month to find out if anything moved.

   Skip it if you used it before the paywall: exports now carry a watermark unless you pay, and reviewers have lost recordings to a bug that reports them as zero seconds long.

   Official site ↗More lists with Skyflow

   

Succulent is one of mine — everything else on this list is someone else’s app. How that works.