New iPhone App often misses locations

Bug Reports
1

Platform: iOS (new app)

App version number, if a mobile app issue: 1.0.3 (162)

Browser, if a website issue:

URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages:

Screenshots of what you are seeing:

Description of problem: I started using the new iPhone App recently and have been very happy for the most part (big improvement over the old one!), however, I keep running into the issue of iNat not saving my location and also not alerting me, that a location is missing, when I want to save an observation. iNat is one of the few apps that have access to my location, so I am used to plugging it in manually, when I upload from the galery. However, with the new app, I often take photo diretly in the app and save and then later realize, that the observation has not been geotagged. This happens very often, albeit compeltely irregularly, meaning on the same 1 hour walk I might have 10 observations with location but 15-20 without it. It wouldn’t be such a problem if the app alerted you to this when trying to save an observation, but it does not (unlike the old app). So as it stands, I often return from walks and when I want to synchronize my observations with the web, I realize that more than half of my observations lack a location. This is extremely annoying, as I have to remember and manually add all the location, which is very time consuming.

P.S. I also have the suspicion that the location gets logged and later deleted/not saved in the app, since I usually realize the red text in the observation field, that says “Missing location” (or something along that line). Rather, I believe the location gets shown, but gets lost upon saving the observation (however, this is specualtion, it could just be me not paying enough attention).

1 Like
2

Are you able to share a screen recording of your observation creation process with help@inaturalist.org?

3

I just did! Thank you for letting me know :)

1 Like
4

So you find that this happens during a hike where you’re making 10+ observations?

5

OK, after some testing we’ve found a bug here that may be the one you’re encountering. It definitely results in the app not fetching your location until you quit and restart the app.

  1. In standard mode (don’t turn on advanced settings), take a photo with the AI camera.
  2. Before you reach the match screen (while the app is analyzing for a better ID), go back to the camera.
  3. Take a photo.
  4. App now takes a long time to get to the match screen
  5. When you get to the match screen, the “add a location” section appears but you can’t tap it.
  6. Every new observation you make until you quit and reopen the app doesn’t have location recorded.
6

Thank you for investigating! This might indeed be the bug I’m encountering. I will test it out later and report back. To answer your previous question: yes, it usually happens when I make many observations on a walk. Indeed, I often switch to the camera in between using iNat, since the iNat cam is so slow and for fast insects etc. it is usually not sufficent. I don’t remember quitting the app during the match screen, that would somehow feel wrong (it at leat seems unliekly to me that I do it so regularly as to trigger this bug as often as I encountered it).

1 Like
7

I did not have luck replicating the behaviour at home. Could it be that the bug is also influenced by Wifi/Network connection (I usually have my phone in airplane mode while using iNat as it saves a lot of battery).