I built Mali because I kept finding out what my plants needed about a week after they needed it. Not for lack of caring — I cared enormously. Keeping a garden happy turns out to be an invisible, unprompted, every-few-days job that never quite asks for your attention until something has already changed. And I didn't want to spend my time catching up on what I'd missed. I wanted to be there for the growing part. Mali is the app I needed: one that notices before I do, and tells me why.
This is the long version, because the short version makes it sound like I had a plan. I didn't. I had a greenhouse, a lockdown, and a long run of never quite keeping up with my own plants.
The greenhouse in Henley-on-Thames
I learned to garden during lockdown, at my then-girlfriend's parents' house in Henley-on-Thames. They were gardeners. Proper ones — the kind who know what they're doing without narrating it. And we built a greenhouse together.
If you have never built one, the surprising part is how much of it is decisions rather than construction. Where does it go? How much sun does that corner actually get, not in your head but across a whole day? What goes in first? Every one of those questions is a gardening question wearing a DIY costume, and I got to ask all of them out loud to two people standing right next to me who knew the answers.
That was the part I didn't notice at the time. I wasn't learning gardening from a book or an app. I was learning it from people who were physically there, on a schedule that had completely dissolved, in a year where nobody had anywhere else to be. I had infinite time and a live expert within shouting distance. Under those conditions, I was great at gardening.
I want to be precise about this, because it's the whole point of what came later: I wasn't good at gardening. I was well-scaffolded. Remove the scaffolding and see what happens.
Then I tried to do it on my own
Lockdown ended. Real life came back — work, a calendar, a city — and the scaffolding went with it.
What followed was a long stretch of what I can only describe as a reactive loop. I would not think about a plant at all, for days, and then one afternoon I would properly look at one and think: oh no. How long has that been like that? The answer was always the same. Longer than I'd like. Then I'd panic-water it, panic-google it, do something dramatic, and go back to not thinking about it until the next time it staged an intervention.
Here's the thing that took me embarrassingly long to work out. This is not a memory problem. I do not forget my plants the way I forget a password. I forget them the way you forget a thing that never once pings you.
Plants have no notification layer. They don't escalate. They just quietly get on with declining, silently, for a week or two, and then present you with a symptom — and the symptom is already the end of the story, not the beginning. By the time a leaf goes yellow, whatever caused it happened a while back. That's why a yellow leaf is such a frustrating thing to google: you're trying to diagnose an event from its aftermath, days late, from a photo of the wreckage.
And I don't think that's a character flaw, which is the conclusion most of us quietly reach about ourselves. A thing that gives you no signal until the moment has already passed is close to impossible to stay ahead of through sheer willpower — you're being asked to remember, unprompted, on exactly the right day, forever, with no feedback at all when you get it right. That's not a test of how much you care. It's a badly designed interface.
It was never that I didn't care about the plant. It's that the plant and I had no shared channel until it was already bad news.
Why reminders didn't fix it
My first instinct was the obvious one, and I suspect it's yours: just set a reminder. Water every Sunday. Done. Problem solved by calendar.
It did not work, for two separate reasons that I think are worth pulling apart.
The first is horticultural. Plants don't drink on a calendar. They drink based on light, heat, season, humidity, pot size, soil, and how big they've got since you bought them. The same plant might need water twice a week in a bright July and once a fortnight in a dark, cold January. A fixed weekly reminder is wrong most of the year by definition. It nags you when the soil is still wet, and it sits silent through the fortnight the thing is actually gasping.
The second reason is the one nobody talks about, and it's the one that mattered more for me. A reminder you've learned to dismiss is worse than no reminder at all. Once a notification has been wrong a few times, you stop reading it. You swipe it away before it's finished rendering. And now you've trained yourself, with reps, to ignore the exact channel you built to save you. The reminder didn't just fail. It burned the frequency.
So the problem was never "Akhil needs to be told to water the plant on Sunday". It was "Akhil needs to know that this specific plant, in this specific window, is heading somewhere bad — before it gets there".
That's not a reminder. That's a diagnosis. And a diagnosis needs to look at the plant.
The bit that actually changed it
Here's the turn, and it took me years to see even though it was on my phone the entire time.
I love journaling. I have always loved journaling. And I take photographs of my garden constantly — not usefully, not for any reason, just because I like them. A leaf unfurling. The whole thing looking smug after rain. Photos of the same corner in March and then in June, because the difference is genuinely thrilling and nobody in my life wants to hear about it at that length.
I had a great many of these. And they were doing absolutely nothing except taking up storage.
Then it landed. I was already collecting the data. I just wasn't getting anything back.
Every one of those photos was a check-in I'd already done, for fun, unprompted, with no discipline required — because I wanted to. The photo was already the input. It had a date on it. It had the plant in it. It had, sitting right there in the pixels, the drooping and the colour and the new growth. I was running a beautiful, consistent, years-long observational study and throwing away every single result.
That reframed everything. The question stopped being "how do I make myself do invisible maintenance chores on schedule forever" — a question I had already lost several times — and became "what if the thing I already do for pleasure was the thing that kept the plants alive?"
Because I'd never had trouble taking the photo. I'd had trouble knowing what the photo meant.
And by then AI could actually do that part. Not as a gimmick bolted onto a plant app, but as the specific missing piece: look at this picture, tell me what you see, tell me what's coming, and tell me why so I get slightly better at this each time.
So we built it
I built Mali with a childhood friend. That's a strange sentence to write about a piece of software, but it's the honest description of what happened — two people who have known each other since well before any of this, building the thing badly at first, then less badly.
Everything in it comes back to the same spine: be proactive, not reactive. Tell me before, not after. And when you tell me, teach me something, so that in a year I need you slightly less.
In practice that means Mali is photo-first. You take the picture you were going to take anyway, and that's your check-in — it goes into a journal that builds up over time, so you can watch a plant get bigger, which remains the best part of gardening and the part every other app treats as an afterthought. Mali will identify a plant from that photo if you don't know what it is, and spot diseases and pests from it before they spread. It works out watering from the plant and your actual weather, rather than a fixed weekly ping, and does feeding schedules and pruning nudges the same way. It handles the household plants and the outdoor beds, seeds you're germinating on a windowsill, and knowing when to move seedlings outside. Every morning it gives you one calm summary of what's worth doing today, instead of twelve notifications you'll learn to swipe.
And it explains itself. Every answer tells you the why, because "water it Thursday" makes you dependent and "this dries out fast in a south-facing window in July" makes you a gardener.
Then there's Sidney, who is a small purple snail, and who is in charge of telling you all this. He is helpful, fond of you, and completely unwilling to negotiate about the watering schedule. He is also at war with slugs, which he would like me to make clear are a totally different animal and not his family. I'm not going to explain Sidney any further. You'll meet him.
Where we are now
I live in London now, and Mali is out on both stores, and there are real people using it to look after real gardens, which is a thing I genuinely did not expect to be typing.
We know we've still got a long way to go. There's plenty in the app I want to be better, and plenty I haven't built yet. But the direction has been the same since that first realisation next to a pile of greenhouse panels: the photo you already love taking should be the thing that saves the plant, and something should be watching between the times you remember to look.
If you've been in the reactive loop — if you've ever properly looked at a plant and thought "how long has it been like that" — that's what this is for. It's what it was always for. It was for me first.
FAQ
Do I need to know anything about gardening to use Mali?
No. It's built for the opposite. Mali will identify a plant from a photo if you don't know what it is, and every answer explains the reasoning rather than just issuing an instruction, so you pick things up as you go. The greenhouse in Henley worked for me because someone knowledgeable was standing next to me answering questions out loud — that's the experience we've tried to rebuild.
Is Mali just another reminder app?
No, and this is the distinction the whole thing rests on. A reminder app tells you to water on a schedule you set. Mali works from the plant and your weather, and it's photo-first — you take a picture and it tells you what it sees and what's coming. The goal is to reach you before the symptom, not to nag you on a calendar that was wrong most of the year anyway.
I'm not naturally good with plants. Is this actually going to help?
I'll be honest rather than salesy about it: Mali won't do the noticing for you forever, and there's no app that removes the need to pay some attention. What it does is move the effort onto the part almost nobody struggles with — taking a photo you wanted to take anyway — and take over the part almost everybody loses, which is keeping track of what's quietly changing between the times you remember to look properly. Nobody is naturally good with plants. People are just further along the same learning curve, and the point of Mali is to move you up it faster.
Does Mali work for indoor plants or outdoor gardens?
Both, and they're handled differently on purpose, because they are genuinely different jobs. Household plants get watering matched to your home and pet-safety at a glance. Outdoor beds and borders get your local weather, seasonal heads-ups, and companion planting. Seeds you're germinating indoors get step-by-step guidance and a nudge when it's time to move them outside.
Is Mali free?
It's free to browse, and Mali+ is a subscription with a free trial if you want the full thing. Have a look around first — that's what it's there for.
If any of this sounded uncomfortably familiar, that's genuinely why we made it. Take a photo of the plant you're worried about and let Sidney tell you what he sees. Download on iOS or get it on Android.
— Akhil Madan, founder of Keeda Studios. I learned to garden in someone else's greenhouse with someone else's parents telling me what to do, and built Mali because I couldn't work out how to keep that going on my own.