What we're building next on DetectID

Welcome to the DetectID blog. We’ll use this space for announcements, feature releases, and the occasional behind-the-scenes note about how the identification engine is improving. This first post is a short look at what’s coming next.

The headline: DetectID’s identification engine is the wedge, but the platform is being built out into a proper companion app for UK detecting — covering everything you currently juggle across spreadsheets, tide apps, soil charts and notebooks. The plan is for almost all of it to be free, sitting alongside the identification quota you already get on Free, Basic and Premium.

What’s shipping immediately

• Stats dashboard. A live counter strip on your My findspage — total finds, this year, breakdown by period (Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Medieval, Post-medieval, Modern), top ruler, and Treasure Act flags. Free for everyone with a collection.
• CSV export. One-click export of your collection to CSV. Open it in Excel, Numbers or your favourite spreadsheet tool. Your data is yours.
• Detector brand tagging. Tag each find with the detector you used (Minelab, XP, Nokta, Garrett, Quest, Whites and others). Useful for your own records and the basis for the upcoming brand-leaderboard feature.

What’s coming in the next few weeks

Route tracking

We already let you log a “detecting session” with a name and start/end times. Next: GPS breadcrumb route tracking, so as you walk you can see your covered ground live on the map. The motivation is simple — the apps detectorists love most have this, and it makes sure no patch of permission gets missed.

Achievement badges

Light, optional, fun. Earn badges as you log finds — First Roman, First Hammered Silver, First Treasure Act flag, 10 hammered silver, 100 finds logged, Rally Captain veteran. Shown on your public profile if you choose to share. No grind mechanics, no notifications; just a tidy way to see your own progress.

Tide times, weather, and soil overlay

Three small additions that turn DetectID into more than just an identification tool. Beach detectorists get a tide widget. Soil composition (from the British Geological Survey’s free public data) shows up under each find pin so you can calibrate detector sensitivity. Local weather conditions sit on your dashboard — useful when planning a session.

Permission tracker

The big one. Right now detectorists track their permissions in notebooks, spreadsheets and increasingly long What3Words lists. The permission tracker lets you draw a polygon on a map, label it (e.g. “Manor Farm — Lord X — valid through 2027”), and pin every find that’s come off that land. Built so you can see the “productivity” of each permission at a glance, and so you don’t forget which farm you have permission on next year.

Field journal entries

Log a session without burning identification credits. Quick notes like “four hours, mostly modern junk, lost a 50p somewhere” or “rally near Lincolnshire, didn’t identify anything worth posting”. Costs us nothing, helps you track effort, and means you don’t spend your IDs on coins you already recognise.

What we’re deliberately NOT doing

A few things competing apps push hard that we’re leaving alone on purpose:

• Fake magnetometer detection.Apps that wave your phone over a fork to flicker a needle are novelty. We don’t want our brand near that.
• Competing with OS Maps.Outside Maps and Ordnance Survey already do the mapping piece well. We’ll layer historic OS as a Premium overlay (once licensing is squared with the National Library of Scotland), but we’re not building a general-purpose mapping app.
• Permission booking marketplace.Other apps have announced this for years and haven’t shipped it. The insurance + landowner-agreement side is hard, and probably off-brand for a Phase 1 identification platform. We’ll revisit.

Open invitation

If there’s something on this list you want sooner, or something not on the list that would actually help you in the field, let us know. We’ll be writing follow-up posts as each feature ships, with proper how-to guides where the UX needs explaining.

Thanks for being on DetectID early. We’re building this for people like you.