iNaturalist Next with poor/no cell phone connectivity

[charlie]

I’m testing iNaturalist Next while traveling in a country where i don’t have a data plan. I’m finding that the app is missing a lot of functionality without cell service/internet causing me to go back to using the old app in this situation. I know the app is in development and am definitely not posting this as a complaint but just as a discussion of these issues. But i am hoping with new updates the issues are addressed. In addition to traveling to different countries, when i am near home but in remote areas like wetlands in conservation areas, there’s usually no cell service there either.

Some issues:

-the computer vision sometimes works offline, but it doesn’t work very well. It’s kind of bouncing around a lot, and suggests things that are very wrong. I was excited for offline algorithm use but i think it needs improvement for it to be valuable without connectivitiy

-it’s not possible to write in a species name if the offline algorithm doesn’t show the correct one. For instance, if i see Carex intumescens, and there’s no connectivity, the old app lets me write that in, or just ‘carex’. If i see it with the new app in this situation, all i can do is leave the ID blank or put in ‘plants’ which isn’t ideal and adds a pointless step. I know the workflow desire is to avoid ‘unknown’ observations but i think this will make it worse as without placeholder text, you are left with things with no ID at all instead, the dreaded ‘unknown’ observations.

-The syncing is wonky with poor connectivity. A bunch of my observations disappeared from the app and i was worried they were deleted. They weren’t, but the syncing seemed very delayed, I looked at the other app with some phone connectivity and they were there, but they were not on the iNat Next app.

-there are currently one or two more clicks to add an observation compared with the old app and the app runs slower with no connectivity so it ends up being frustrating when i’m trying to take lots of data fast, which is usually the case.

Overall i like iNat Next significantly more than the old app, but if the offline functionality isn’t improved, i’ll probably be forced to go back to using the old app and will be really frustrated when that one gets updated to what is now Next. So i hope you’ll consider these issues!

[oksanaetal]

I was in an area with reasonable cell service (3-4 ‘bars’) and it took ~25 min to upload 8 observations with Next.

[silversea_starsong]

The ability to write in a placeholder name while offline is huge, please bring this back from the old version. I know it’s not something that seems intuitively necessary but I will say it’s much of some of our workflows when observing in more remote places.

[charlie]

yes i know sometimes people put in placeholders that don’t translate to names directly, causing some confusion on the site, but totally deleting a feature that is crucial to most power users in most parts of the world isn’t going to be a good call. If you’re that worried about it you can just have it pop up a warning before upload indicating that once you are back connected to the internet you can fix the name. But it’s not possible to do that where there’s no cell service.

[silversea_starsong]

There are solutions. For instance, if you then come into cell service, or even better try and upload with a “placeholder”, it could nag you then.