Large number of app users with Date Observed missing

i don’t think this is a spotty connection issue exactly / per se. compare this observation with the subsequent couple of observations made by this same user, also in the same area. notice that the subsequent observations are recorded just fine and are based on EDT (which i assume is the user’s default time zone, even though the location itself is in California). but notice how the problem observation has a strange observation date (and also photo date) that shows just a date. also notice how that observation stores its submit date as UTC.

i’m just speculating here, but i can see a situation where the user opens up the app and maybe if that first observation is made while the app is still initializing stuff, you can get this kind of weirdness. it seems like it might not know what time zone to use and so that might cause problems somehow.

if you look at

in this case, the observed date is missing, the photo date is missing, but the photo metadata does show a datetime. it’s weird that photo seems to not have translated the photo metadata properly for whatever reason. note the times recorded in this observation and the subsequent observation. they appear to have been observed about 15 minutes apart in roughly the same place. the first observation would have been the first of the day. the time recorded in the photo metadata is very close to the submitted time of that problem observation. so i’m guessing again here, but it’s possible that the app might not be done initializing stuff, and that might be causing problems somehow.

so, so far, it looks to me like there might possibly be 4 kinds of situations mixed up in this thread:

  1. problems while the app is still initializing (noted above in this post)
  2. problems with the metadata in the loaded photo (as noted by kueda, and also present in a couple of other examples noted in the thread. the seem to be cropped photos.)
  3. problems with observed time > submitted time (noted by me in an earlier post)
  4. problems syncing