I don’t want you to delete this. I am trying to state my personal opinion (auto-upload is annoying but does more good than harm for new users), and trying to articulate the history behind this very conscious design choice in the iNat mobile apps. I’m not against polls, I just want to make clear that their power to prove statements about the behavior of people who use our apps has its limits. Maybe I should be more clear in the future about when I am speaking for myself and when I am giving voice to THE OPINION OF INATURALIST or somesuch.
I am also not some kind of growth junky. I want new people to have a good experience the first time they use the app, and by good I mean the full interaction loop: notice, record, upload, receive feedback in the form of identifications and comments, be motivated to notice and record more things. Prior to auto-upload, we watched tons of people fall out of that at the upload stage, so we tried to address the problem. I’m open to addressing the problem in different ways, and I think the proposal in the first post of this now-merged thread to default to manual upload with push reminders later to upload is worth considering (though, IMO personally annoying, technically more challenging, and maybe even more dissuasive to new users who don’t like pushy apps).
On a meta note, I think merging / splitting the topics both caused all the existing votes on your poll to be silo’d at https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/app-users-survey-auto-sync/1119, and confused the conversation here. Well, I was / am confused. My comment above about the goals of this poll and the biased nature of voters in this forum referred specifically to the poll in https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/app-users-survey-auto-sync/1119. Maybe I’m just excessively confused b/c I didn’t know you could merge topics. Seems like a dangerous feature of Discourse to me.