I’ve been trying to use iNat Next (running version 0.59.13 – the latest, I think) more of the time lately to get used to it for the future and to see how it fits my observing workflow. In warmer parts of the year, I generally end up taking a number of observations daily (usually between 10 and 300 — not a stray zero, that’s three hundred on some summer days!) of 1-4 photos each, and saving them all without uploading any of them in the field. The tactic of not immediately uploading can be flexible if I’m botanising in an area with good cell coverage, but it drains the battery of my phone unnecessarily and I feel it is best avoided. Meanwhile, the need to keep these several to hundreds of observations waiting and un-uploaded in the app is entirely non-negotiable during periods when I’m on vacation or in the field with zero cell data service. (Even in local forest preserves near where I live, there are pockets or large swaths with 1 or 0 bars of cell service.)
However, even though I’ve saved up only a small fraction in the past few weeks of what I might see in a single day during the peak growing season, iNat Next is having serious trouble handling these un-uploaded observations. It’s very slow to open, or will display the home screen with parts missing and no options “clickable” for at least 5 seconds (usually 5-8s). Once the cached draft observations do show up, it’s essentially permanently slowed down on the main screen as long as there’s more than about 10 of them saved. Taking photos is as fast or slow as usual, unaffected by number of saved draft observations.
Here is how it looks upon opening the app and waiting those 5+ seconds (when nothing is selectable):
Here’s what happens when it does begin to load and I try to scroll down – it loads the observations quite slowly, I think retrieving all draft observations (51 in this case, per the screen) between 30 seconds and 1 minute. The draft observations show up one by one, but it’s easy to outpace the loaded ones and have to wait on a blank screen for a while:
And once they do load, they take a long time to “de-interlace” – that is, many of them show up with overlapping text initially and only slowly straighten out:
Once it’s in the “slowly loading and arranging the draft observation preview boxes” phase, it is possible to tap on the large plus / + icon to add a new observation, but it takes 4 seconds or so to bring up the menu of observation addition options, and about 3 more to turn on the camera (though that might be just how the phone is). Scrolling through the saved draft observations continues to be quite slow and jerky even once they’re all apparently loaded into proper positions.
I have the app presently set to these settings, if that’s relevant.
I’m not sure if it’s definitively the saved observations that are slowing down the app, or if it’s just coincident with that fact. Ultimately though, I may have to keep using the old iNaturalist iPhone app just for reasons of speed and efficiency. There’s a lot that the old app can’t do, but for simple creation of observations and scrolling through them prior to upload, I’m just finding the iNaturalist Next situation to be relatively unusable for now. I think I’ll need to catalogue and upload the 50+ observations that I have sitting in iNaturalist Next and then see if that speeds up its performance.
I’ve elsewhere also expressed the opinion that I’d really like it if the “Save” button were as big as the “Upload Now” button, since I have essentially no use case for the latter. However, that’s a moot point if iNaturalist Next is too slow in handling saved draft observations to contemplate switching to it fulltime.