Please fill out the following sections to the best of your ability, it will help us investigate bugs if we have this information at the outset. Screenshots are especially helpful, so please provide those if you can.
Platform (Android, iOS, Website): Android
App version number, if a mobile app issue (shown under Settings or About): 1.36.8 (628)
Description of problem (please provide a set of steps we can use to replicate the issue, and make as many as you need.): Today I made 23 new observations in the field. Every time I try to upload these observations from my Android app 1.36.8, iNaturalist crashes.
Step 1: I press Upload. iNat says âPreparingâŚâ for about 5 seconds, then the whole iNat screen disappears and my phone returns to its home screen. Nothing has been uploaded.
What size are the photos you are uploading? Something similar to this happens sometimes to mine, but I have noticed it only happens when I have my phone camera set to 50 megapixel images. When selecting photos taken at 12 megapixels, there are no issues.
Thank you for the tip. I havenât changed any camera settings lately, and the photos have always worked before. I just looked at the photos for the first observation to be uploaded. They are all about 1.0 MB in size, which seems reasonable.
I just looked at more of the photos. While most are in the 1.0-1.5 MB range, some are in the 3-5 MB range, and a very few are in the 7-9 MB range. Do you know what the size limit for iNat might be?
I have had this problem before. I discovered the cause was that my phone was putting an incorrect time stamp on anything captured between 11 p.m. and midnight, and was actually showing a time in the future. iNaturalist wasnât able to process the time stamp until 24 hours went by. Same issue with the looped âpreparingâ and crash.
I donât have a solution, but Iâd like to add that I started experiencing the same todayâcrashing during observation upload. Google Pixel 4a-5G, Android 14.
Could it happen because of poor internet connection in your region? I had the same during a was in a small valey, and later on, the upload was fine as usual.
which device do you have? We log crashes by device type.
if you try again and it crashes again, please open the app back up and send us log files from the app, that may capture the issue. To send log files, go to the About tab in the iNaturalist app and tap three times on the version number. You will then have the option to email the log files to us.
So our Android developer took a look. Thereâs one crash in the logs and itâs due to an out-of-memory issue during upload. There are a few other crashes for this device, those are also for out-of-memory issues. So itâs likely the device just may not have enough RAM.
@tsn , in light of @tiwaneâs comment about RAM, if you havenât already increased your phoneâs virtual RAM, doing so might resolve the problem (search âRAM Boostâ in your Motorola phoneâs settings).
Thanks to the Android developer and thanks to all of you for your suggestions. I donât use Auto upload, so that shouldnât be an issue. I searched in phone settings for RAM boost and the search turned up nothing. Maybe my 2020 Moto g power phone is too old to have RAM boost capability? But the thing is that what I am trying to do (upload some new observations) is no different from what I have done many, many times before with this same phone. I canât think of anything that has changed recently.
What is the recommended amount of RAM for using version 1.36.8 (628)? Has the required RAM gone up significantly in the last year or so, as the Android app has grown?