iNaturalist Updates for January 2025

Here’s a list of iNat updates for January 2025.

General

  • Two new Computer Vision models were released, 2.18 and 2.19!
  • iNat conducted a webinar about plant phenology and how to annotate plant observations on iNaturalist!
  • The iNat team continues to gather feedback for the iNaturalist Next app, which has been soft-launched for iPhones.
  • Continued work on API v2 - curators can test it and provide feedback, see this topic
  • Many additional translations throughout the websites and apps - you can help

Website

  • Added functionality to search for observations by time of day.
  • Various small bug fixes and changes.

Android

View all release notes

  • Several bugfix releases, the latest of which is 1.36.5 (625)
  • The Android app’s replacement continues to be in pre-Alpha testing

Legacy iOS & iPadOS

  • No new version release
  • Fixed a minor server-side bug that affected photo editing in observations.

Seek

  • No monthly challenges will be released for the foreseeable future.
  • Internal testing with an updated onboard model

iNaturalist Next (currently iPhone only)

  • Version 0.54.1 released, with multiple bug fixes and updates
  • Please provide feedback if you’re using it! There’s an option in the app’s side menu to do so.

iNat Blog

For even more bug fixes and updates, check out iNaturalist on github and see previous monthly updates.

16 Likes

Anything going on with that experiment in which identifiers are shown the observations of new users?

4 Likes

Yes please. I have taken that as a prompt to keep up with Newbies for the Western Cape and Africa. It is the (very) small window to catch people - please split, please delete, where, when, bird or beetle, come back …

3 Likes

I really wish the Android app received more attention. Since Android is the dominant mobile system in Brazil, it’s frustrating to recommend iNaturalist to people without a computer—where the experience is clearly best—knowing they will have to rely on a slow app with a poor layout. Many users might give up on the platform because of this.

Is there a specific challenge in developing the app for Android, or is it more a matter of limited resources, prioritization, or a lack of trained professionals?

2 Likes

There are limited resources for development yes but but mostly the first reason:

That said, I have not experienced the current Android app being slow? You may want to open a new topic to help troubleshoot the issue you are running into.

2 Likes