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):
iOS 18.4.1 iPhone SE App version number, if a mobile app issue (shown under Settings or About):
102 161 Browser, if a website issue (Firefox, Chrome, etc) :
URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages:
Screenshots of what you are seeing (instructions for taking a screenshot on computers and mobile devices: https://www.take-a-screenshot.org/):
Description of problem (please provide a set of steps we can use to replicate the issue, and make as many as you need.):
Step 1:
While identifying observations the device gets remarkably warm with some little sunlight even hot to the point where the screen starts to dim down
Step 2:
Indeed.
Currently I hold back about 200 to 500 observations in the app which are not uploaded to the server (so as to not overwhelm IDer with the sheer amount of obs). From time to time I release batches of up to 50 or so to be uploaded.
Onto that batch of local observations I added a greater number of observation without identifying them in the first place. After the adding was done I started identfying those observations that are still only in the app as part of then about 250. During this identification the phone got realy hot as described above.
Meanwhile I realized that the mere browsing in those offline observation makes the device to get hot to a similar extend.
FWIW I don’t think the app is designed for this kind of use, this seems like a lot of observations to make and to hold back. I don’t know if it’s related to energy use, but I think it does mean the app is storing a lot in its cache. You might consider making fewer observations and/or just uploading them sooner and not leaving so many in reserve.
Thanks. Might be good enough as an explanation.
I also understand, that what I am doing is very special. Sometimes edge cases reveal deeper issues. However, I am also fine, if the topic is closed without further actions.
Just to explain: for me it is a more or less normal situation. Im doing it this way for different reasons. First: I avoid uploading observations in the main observation season during a weekend in my area, and also while there are events like a bio blitz or educational event. This is just, because in my area identifiers including myself are owerwhelmed be the numbers, and many observations don’t get a review because of the numbers.
And also: while I am on a holiday trip I tend to make some 100 to 200 observations per day, that I would not upload until I am back at my accommodation. I then would upload the observations, then go back in the list to identify and then start synchronisation. On reason is that synchonizing slows down the app significantly and tend to fail more often if I deal whith the app during this process.
Like @misumeta I am sometimes on holiday and will make large numbers of observations while out – but usually (e.g. if in Canada) I don’t even have internet at where I’m staying, and thus I need the app to actually hold up to hundreds of observations in the cache at a time, at least if I made the observations through the app. Thus there isn’t really much of a choice I can make, unless the idea is just to not upload much to iNaturalist at all… or perhaps to take photos, notes, and annotations outside the app, which is not my preferred workflow. It’s just a bit odd that the solution to an app issue would be “just don’t use the app that much”.
Side note still related to the topic: Obviously iNaturalist Classic can’t do nearly as much as the new app, but it’s much more responsive in its limited functions, and I’ve never had any problem storing several hundred observations in the old app – while I’ve had all sorts of difficulties with the new app. Between the energy consumption detailed in this thread and the display/interface jerkiness and slowness to appear (that I’ve put in other threads), I’ve lately gone back to iNat Classic for actually taking and uploading photos from my phone, just because it’s so many times faster. Of course I still appreciate the much better (even than the web version) notifications display in the new app… but I also have to check my web-version dashboard for notifications on flags. Right now it’s a bit of a disjointed situation where I can only efficiently use each iNaturalist interface for a single function.
I am not sure whether it’s worth to create a new issue but: aside from that upload experience the app seems to slow down with the total number of observations I have made. It now reaches a point where it gets annoying. I started to reduce my activities on iNat. I really consider to start a new account to get rid of the 40.000 observations in my profile.
I have 53k observations and the app runs fine for me. I don’t think it’s the total number of observations you have, it’s the number of observations that aren’t uploaded.
I know you said it’s not your preferred method, but you could create folders within your photo gallery for each individual obs and take notes in the ios version of notepad. It could really help with your battery.
Also, while I’m no tech guru, I believe stressing your battery with frequent high draw like this will shorten its life, as well as increase the risk of a battery exploding. That happened to my friend with one of those vape things in his pocket. Third degree burns and a skin graft on his thigh.
If you are concerned about uploading large numbers of observations during the summer, is there a reason why you can’t take photos with a camera app on your phone and then later upload them from your gallery instead of saving them in the iNat app?
I honestly don’t see any compelling argument for waiting to upload observations. Summer can be overwhelming for identifiers, but it is going to be overwhelming anyway, regardless of whether one user waits to upload observations or not. As long as your 100 to 200 observations per day are not dozens of observations of the same thing, it is likely they will not all be looked at by the same IDers anyway.
(At this point I mostly use a camera for my observations, but even when I relied exclusively on my cell phone to take photos, I used the camera app and then uploaded the photos from my gallery later, because that way I could go through the photos at my leisure and edit them, decide which ones I wanted to upload, research IDs, etc. If I go through them within a few days, normally I can remember any relevant additional information like host plant or habitat – assuming I knew enough to check it in the first place. While out observing, I would find it distracting to also fuss about with organizing photos into observations. I realize workflows vary and I may not be typical in this respect, but I don’t fully understand the advantage of storing all the photos as un-uploaded observations in the iNat app instead of in the phone gallery.)
I too use the camera app and upload the photos later into iNat for similar reasons (select, research, cut out). I just don’t start syncing my weekend observations earlier than Monday evening.
The app gets slower and slower. I started to read a printed newspaper while going through my notifications in the app because I have to wait between tapping on some element and the reaction (a few seconds between tapping and reaction). I also started to use the classic app for notifications when I just rush through the confirmations, which is still as fast as it was in the past). Would a screen recording be helpful?
I don’t know if it’s still the case but there used to be an issue where if you used the app for a long time (months/years) it would slowly start taking up a lot of space and slow down the phone in general. As far as I know that’s been fixed, but it’s possible you’re experiencing something similar? In which case you could try logging out and back in, or uninstalling and reinstalling the app, and see if that helps, if you haven’t tried that yet.
If this is the same issue one of our staff members reported, it seems to come from going through 10 or more notifcations in the app. We’re deleting and reinstalling the app all the time when testing to make sure that updates which affect new users and fresh installs are working, so I doubt their app had been on the device for a long time.