I’ve observed the location accuracy has gotten worse with iNat over the last several years. I’m basing that based on comparisons with the map and points imported into GIS rather than the stated accuracy. It’s a lot more likely to put points in the wrong place than it used to be. I’m not sure what ch…

[image] charlie: It’s a lot more likely to put points in the wrong place than it used to be. I’ve noticed that too, and just assumed that the fault was with my phone. It used to reliably place observations in my neighborhood, but now regularly places them miles away. (I haven’t changed my acc…

I moved the above posts from here to a new topic. I’ll also note that the original post in the thread where this conversation originated is about the device’s camera app’s accuracy, not the accuracy recorded in iNat. I personally haven’t noticed any issues with GPS accuracy in the app over the past…

Yeah, i am not sure the cause of the issue is from iNat’s end. I had one series of issues when I was in Quebec in Canada where i do not have a cell phone plan, and that seemed to confuse it more than no cell service at all. A bunch of points were very wrong though they had a huge uncertainty buffer …

My response was for my camera app as well. This initial significant inaccuracy is why I care so much about adding or double-checking the accuracy when I upload images off my phone, since I’m assuming that if the accuracy is extremely low then the actual location is probably off as well.

Last winter I was in a pretty deep redwood forest canyon and testing out an early version of iNat Next. No matter what, during a stretch of trail the app would never get below about 5km of accuracy. I then opened Apple Maps to see if that got a more accurate reading of my location but it also stubbo…

So, smartphones generally use what’s called A-GPS, not pure GPS. They use a few GPS bands, and fine-tune using distances to cell towers. A handheld GPS unit relies purely on the GPS satellite signals and uses up to 12 bands for most common handheld ones, with each band corresponding to one satelli…

This a common problem when taking GPS readings in tall forest or valleys, even in a city street surrounded by skyscrapers. It is all to do with the number of satellites your device can detect which is usually a function of the amount of open sky above you. Readings taken from a boat out at sea or wh…

I maintain an app that records GPS tracks, and over the past year, we’ve also had a rising number of reports about declining accuracy—sometimes with locations off by several kilometers, even though the phone indicates that the location is accurate. Our testing shows this issue affects all apps on t…

This is indeed a really annoying ‘bug’ in the INaturalist-app (at least in Android, which I use). It seems as if the current position has to be found again ‘from zero’ each time you open the app while it is running in the background. In contrast, the Obsmap-app ( observation.org ) doesn’t loose the GP…

Is iNat App GPS getting less accurate?

General

upupa-epops November 5, 2024, 1:47pm 3

I regularly have this as well, even more dramatically, where the first couple photos will have accuracy in the range of 2-3000 m before it settles down and goes to 5-20 m.

New iNaturalist iPhone app: What are your thoughts after trying it for a while?

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Is iNat App GPS getting less accurate?

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