Observations uploaded via the website don't sync to phone

Bug Reports
1

Platform: Android / Website

App version number, if a mobile app issue: version was 1.36.8 but issue persisted after updating to 1.38.2

Browser, if a website issue: Chrome

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

Screenshots of what you are seeing:

image
image1392Ɨ957 401 KB

29864
298641080Ɨ2400 272 KB

29865
298651080Ɨ2400 594 KB

Description of problem:

(Image 1 description: my observation page as displayed by the website, where the violet and black knot were observations uploaded via the app, and the rest were uploaded via the website. The image shows all the observations I have made to date in the order that I uploaded them)

(Image 2 description: my observation page as displayed by the android app, which only includes observations that were uploaded via the app, except for the firefly and strawberry which were uploaded via the website)

(Image 3 description: viewing my observations on the android app through the explore page rather than on my profile shows all the observations correctly the same way it does on the website)

Step 1: Create an iNaturalist post via the website

Step 2: open the iNaturalist android app and refresh the page

Step 3: what happens: Species and Observation counts increase as expected right away, but over a day later the observations uploaded via the website still donā€™t appear on the app

Step 4: However, if the observation yields a notification (e.g. someone leaves a comment or an ID) and I click on the notification via the activity page, the observation syncs to my phone (which is why the Winter Firefly and Virginia Strawberry appear on the app despite being uploaded through the website)

If thereā€™s any other details that would be helpful please let me know. Thanks for looking into this!

2

(moderators probably need to close the previous bug report.)

3

2 questions:

Just to be sure, have you tried trying to scroll up past the top of the list? That initiates a refresh. Sometimes mine donā€™t show up on the phone for a few days until I do that.

Second thought: There was a time where I had just started using the phone app after I already had a couple thousand observations and it seemed to be a looooot of data to load when I did eventually try using my phone. Eventually it would slowly load what I would call ā€œchunksā€ of observations at a time, and every chunk that loaded seemed to make the rest load faster as if it were easier to ā€˜digestā€™. If youā€™re just getting started on the phone app something similar may be happening.

4

Yes, Iā€™m refreshing by pulling down. Have closed the app and updated it too.

5

Iā€™ve been a long time app user. All my observations are (and have been) on there for quite some time now, except for the recent bunches which havenā€™t been syncing. I actually only started adding observations through the website recently when I got a camera, and Iā€™m usually adding at most 10-15 observations at a time.

This isnā€™t the first time Iā€™ve had this issue, but usually after about an hour, or when I post an observation from my phone and refresh, it would fix itself. This is the first time itā€™s been a few days (and a few phone observations later) that it hasnā€™t caught up. May just need time to ā€œdigestā€ like you said.

6

if youā€™re absolutely sure that doing a pull refresh on your my observations page in the app isnā€™t updating the observations, you should probably generate a log file and send it to staff.

7

Confident that Iā€™m doing a pull refresh. Thanks for the advice, Iā€™ll have to read up on how to do that later because itā€™s late at night for me

8

To send a log file, go to the About tab in the app and tap three times on the app version number. You will then have the option to send debug logs - you can email them to help@inaturalist.org

9

Thanks! Iā€™ve sent them now

10

Got it! It may not get to our engineers until next week.