Putting here not in bugs, because it isn’t really anything specific and I also don’t know if it’s on my end or theirs.
Has anyone else noticed that the iNat app crashes like a lot now? More than it did when I started. My phone even suggested putting it into a deep sleep due to frequent crashes.
Is it just me? I’m in Canada and on Samsung if that means anything.
I’ve definitely been annoyed at how frequently iNat Next freezes, it’s way too common that I have to restart the app 5+ times before it will actually let me do anything. This is an on iPhone 15 with a strong internet connection too. Sometimes I just go back to the old app to upload an observation rather than suffering through it.
It has been crashing consistently for me since I first started using it in 2020.
The app quickly overloads while I scroll through observations and starts malfunctioning until it crashes. It also used to overheat my previous phone.
I don’t know anything about how apps work but I’ve had similar issues, especially when uploading more than a few observations at a time or scrolling through a lot of them. I wonder if it’s a caching issue, and if there may be an easy way to clear it? I’ve noticed if I delete the app and then re-download it, it crashes less for a while.
Trying to do just about anything on the Android app has a high chance of freezing the entire app. I think just about the only thing that doesn’t seem to result in freezes is tabbing between Obs/Species/Indentifications, or between My Content/Following/News in the activity section. Opening obs and tapping the button to make new obs often freeze the whole thing, and searches usually need to be run 2-3 times before a result is returned.
I’ve often wondered if the problem is that I have over 40,000 observations, and maybe the way it handles large lists just doesn’t scale.
+100! It freezes, force closes and spins around in the cycle of frustration for many seconds. I think a lot of software sends too much info upstream, shares too much and hogs all available memory before allowing the user to actually use it as intended. I’ve tried it on two different phones, same result. I’ve stopped using the app for anything useful and work on my laptop instead; there is no earthly reason something as enjoyable as iNat should become an exercise in frustration.
To clear the cache, you can just log out and then log in again. It will also consume less storage for some time.
As far as I can tell this topic is about the iNaturalist app for Android. There’s a separate topic for the freezing issue with iNaturalist for iPhone.
@felicia54513 exactly which Samsung device do you have? What are you doing when it crashes?
I only use iNat on my mac computer (I don’t have a phone), and sometimes I have trouble; it is a bit slower than my other sites, especially when I upload lots of photos to submit to iNat, because it takes up so much memory storage. The screen freezes for a few seconds, but it once I start grouping pics into obs, it gets better; I think it is the sheer number of photos that does it (When you have 110 photos on there at a time, the app might have more trouble, but I don’t mind too much unless I accidentally quit the page and lose all my hard work (Which I HATE!) But when my computer has full charge and internet, it is usually fine, so IDing and going through my obs is okay.
Again, this topic is for the Android app, not the website. I can move your post to a separate topic about slowness on the website. Are you referring to the upload page?
I also have issues with my app crashing on android. This has been true with three different models of phone, and usually when I’m doing identification.
I’m not sure what this means. Are you identifying your own observation, or are you saying this happens when you’re using the Explore screen to ID others’ observations? If the latter, that screen is not designed for heavy identifying use and may cause the app to crash.
Oh, I’m sorry! I didn’t see the android-app tag! I am referring to the upload page.
When I’m identifying for others!
Hi!
Sorry for the delay, and again, I wasn’t sure where to put this thread.
I am using a Galaxy S24+ and it tends to happen while I’m scrolling through observations.
I think something similar is happening. Mine hasn’t overheated, but it does sink my battery life way more than any other app I’ve ever used.