App version number: 1.0.5 (according to app store)
Description of problem:
The iNat app is currently no longer functioning at all. It will open, but I cannot tap on anything and only scroll down for a few observations.
Step 1: The app can be opened normally, and when opening it shows me my observations, as intended.
Step 2: scrolling through them works, but after the first few observations (16) there’s just a blank white screen.
Step 3: Tap on anything (observations, menu items, whatever), nothing happens, even after waiting for a considerable amount of time.
Step 4: Completely close and restart app → same issue
Step 5: Force-Restart phone → same issue
Step 6: Delete and reinstall app → issue seems to be fixed
Additionally, my phone gets quite warm immediately after opening.
Yes I’ve noticed this as well. While troubleshooting for this post, I also noticed that uninstall/reinstalling made the app so much more responsive and so did logout/login. It must have something to do with cached files not being deleted.
before uninstalling, I’d sometimes have to wait literally 15 seconds before an observation/taxa-page/camera would open and the worst part is that there’s no button feedback anywhere in the app, so sometimes i’d press something, wait the required 10 seconds, get impatient, start thinking maybe it didn’t even register my click, click again, 5 seconds later it it performs a combined original and second click. This is really annoying if the click is, say, the back button in the top left, which means the back button gets clicked twice. Then i have to wait another 15 seconds to undo the double click.
There are two takeaways:
The performance desperately needs fixing
There should be some kind of immediate feedback to indicate a button has been pressed. The old ios inat app did this well.
I’ve never experienced this, but as I’ve said elsewhere it’s common for me to delete the app and install new beta versions for testing so that could be why.
Do you use the Activity tab a lot? I wonder if those observations are being cached somewhere and not cleared. I rarely use the Activity tab.
I honestly didn’t use the app much at all the past few months, since I always have my camera with me and rarely take photos with my phone anymore.
Is the activity tab the “notifications”? That’s the one feature I use the most, but even that I only use maybe once a week, probably less, as I tend to just use the website even on my phone.
Also, since links on the forum open in the app, I often view observations on there.
My new iNat version (1.0.5 (168) with iOS 18.5) has also shown poor response time upon opening the app recently. It hangs up on my list of observations (the “Me” page). (See screen capture.) If I try to click the “+” to add observations or go to the Activity page, the app may only respond after 30 seconds or a minute or two…then it catches up suddenly to all the clicks I have made. After the initial delay, navigation seems to procede at a suitable pace.
I haven’t tried signing out and back in nor deleting and re-installing. Those will be my next steps.
Update (10 minutes later): Signing out and signing back in seems to have reset things properly, at least for the moment. Must have had something to do with data cache.
My crashes always come after using the Activity tab. If I’ve looked at a few things, I have to completely restart the app to be able to post anything. It’s just frozen.
In my case, I had recently completed a 20-day vacation in the Great Plains during which I used the app on my iPhone almost exclusively for making observations and uploading in real time or near-real time. Probably 600+ observations and no telling how many actual photos uploaded (1000? 2000?). I had never signed out during that period, nor in the weeks preceeding nor after the trip.
My app gets stuck loading forever on the activity tab and I can’t click to other tabs without closing the app and re-opening it. I also get stuck on the “Me” tab sometimes, unable to switch to other tabs or load more than eight observations on the tab.
Currently the app takes about 313 mb of storage before deleting or logging out.
