European Starlings killing the connection

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App version number: 0.55.3 (130)

Operating System / Device: iPhone SE (2nd gen) IOS 18.1.1

Screenshots of what you are seeing:

Description of problem: Every time I go to add a taxon ID to a photo of a European Starling, the app says I’m offline and often doesn’t give me any suggestions. But all my other bird photos work without throwing me offline. It’s really strange and always happens without fail on my European Starling observations.

3 Likes

I’ve tried to replicate this under a simulated 3G and LTE network conditions and I never see a situation where only starling observations result in offline suggestions. The offline suggestions appear if the request to get online suggestions takes longer than 5 seconds, which could happen for any number of reasons. Maybe your connection is slow, maybe iNat is being slow to respond. I think the time the app takes to resize the photo before uploading gets counted toward those 5 seconds, so it’s remotely possible there’s something about those photos that’s slower to resize, but that seems like a stretch.

We might consider just ditching this timeout. We added it b/c it seemed really frustrating to be under poor network conditions and wait forever for online suggestions when you know you could see offline suggestions immediately, but this was probably the wrong solution (full disclosure: this solution was my idea).

1 Like

I guess my starlings are just too powerful for my little phone to handle. At least it’s not happening to anyone else and just me.

I do like how it eventually tells me I’m not connected (even though sometimes it’s wrong), but I do think it should be a little longer, maybe 10 seconds.