The iNaturalist app (version 1.37.2) has been working intermittently in Russia for over six months now. A few months ago, it stopped working altogether. It only works with a VPN enabled. On PC, everything is fine; there are no issues. Only the mobile version doesn’t work.
device model: Xiaomi Redmi Note 14 Pro
doesn’t this suggest that there’s a problem with your mobile ISP, the general internet in your area, or your mobile device?
from your mobile device, if you connect to the same wifi as your PC, do you still have issues?
regardless of your connection, can you use the inaturalist.org website from your mobile device even when the app doesn’t work?
when you say that the app doesn’t work, what exactly does that mean? do you see error messages? does the app fail to open altogether? do you have problems uploading observations and using other functions that require internet connectivity?
This is likely part of a national-level internet problem.
According to the Moscow Times:
“Russians using the internet today must navigate ever-widening restrictions, with the total number of blacklisted websites now standing at 4.7 million.
Major platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and X have been blocked since the country invaded Ukraine in 2022.
This, combined with mounting restrictions on popular messengers Telegram and WhatsApp, have pushed many Russians toward regular VPN use.’
while i’m aware of the sorts of internet issues you’re referencing, i didn’t want to jump straight to that sort of conclusion. if the sort of thing you’re suggesting was in effect, i would expect to see big drops in observations created by the particular app at a country level or regional level, and i’m not seeing anything obvious like that.
so i think it’s still worth ruling out other issues for this particular user before we jump to your conclusion.
iNat has 96K observations from Russia from March 2025 and 77K for March of 2026. 2025 was also substantially higher in February than 2026. This obviously isn’t a complete block, and maybe there is something else going on, but it is certainly down.
I would venture to guess that power users, who tend to submit more observations, preferentially use the website (which OP says is accessible) over the app?
BTW, you reminded me of the time I used iNaturalist observation numbers by month to fact check my friend’s claim that tourist numbers in Eilat had nosedived since the war :)
Since which war ? Iran too ?
A reminder to be mindful of the TOS when entering discussions of politics - try to stay focused on the topic at hand (here, troubleshooting a bug).
Can you please try to do something in app, like upload an observation, and when it fails, send us log files? To send log files, go to the About tab in the iNaturalist app and tap three times on the version number. You will then have the option to email the log files to us.
I’m from Russia and connectivity depends on Internet provider. For Rostelecom provider I’ve noticed some issues - site and application does not load from first try, but after several next refreshes everything loads just fine. For several other providers I didn’t noticed any degradation.
Hello, I am also from Russia, and problems with Inaturalist are also observed in the desktop version on PC. The problem is that at some point some pages do not open and load indefinitely. And on the Android version, new notifications and account updates do not appear.
Я из России. Приложение на смартфоне не работает. В веб-версию вхожу только со второго раза через сервисы Гугль.
it sounds like maybe the iNaturalist app just needs to have a bit more robust retry logic to better handle flaky internet connections.
The website itself works fine, no problems. I’m talking about the app that doesn’t work with either WiFi or mobile Internet. In general, I can’t open any observations
It looks like this:
The problem started back in the fall (somewhere around October-November), before the large-scale internet outages. However, considering that everything always works with a VPN, it’s unlikely that the problem is with my device.
do you see problems elsewhere in the app? can you use the explore function to find other people’s observations? are you able to upload or update your own observations using the app?
Yeap, I can upload my observations (although uploading takes a huge amount of time, up to several minutes for an observation with one photo), but it’s impossible to view other people’s observations - the app just shows an endless loading time
but BTW, it’s also impossible to open identifications/comments on my observations - the app there also shows an eternal loading
this might be more evidence that the app might just need to implement some retry logic to handle flaky connections. there might already be some retry logic in the upload process, but maybe the other pages lack it and although they may be failing on the back end, the app might not be reporting the failures.
if you haven’t already, you may want to send iNat staff your app log files so that they can confirm what’s happening:
…
i also wonder if there’s something about the way information is getting parsed in the comments / identifcations? if you were to switch explicitly to use English or even Russian (instead of using your device’s default langauge), i wonder if that would change the app’s behavior? (i’m not sure how using a VPN might work around that sort of problem though.)
thats done 
