Updating the Android App

We are extremely glad to finally release a new major version of the Mapillary Android app. This release corresponds to the recent release of the iOS app.

We have gotten a lot of feedback over the last year, and finally we got around to completely rewrite big parts of the application. There are a few things that stand out as important so we want to mention them.

Performance

  • Upload is now multi-threaded and will use most of the bandwidth available on your phone, resulting in much faster uploads.
  • The camera part is now saving images not in the main thread, but in the background, resulting in a much more fluent user experience and hopefully less stress on the phone's resources.
  • Big grids in the review sections have cached thumbnails of images, resulting in a better user experience with long sequences to review
  • All feed, status and profile updates are now done in the background and not blocking the user interface.

Camera

  • We have added a hot-button to get to the camera in a number of places
  • The UI is cleaned up, and the main settings moved into a easy-to-access side drawer, and on to the full settings page.
  • There is support for UI rotation for left-hand usage.
  • We added a setting to lock the camera direction in forward mode, resulting in 100% correct camera angles when holding the camera forward while riding or walking. Try it out!
  • We added auto-start of new sequences when a certain gap (default 300m) is detected in order to save the trouble of splitting them later in the web editor. Yay!
  • There is now a low-resolution mode intended for mapping in remote areas, possibly uploading via cell connection.
  • On older phones, even manual auto-focus is now supported as a means of taking pictures both in single and sequence mode, giving you better outcomes.

Review

  • There is now deleting of whole sequences available
  • Pictures can be reviewed in a tight grid while holding the phone in portrait mode, a big grid in landscape mode, and a flip-view in detail mode. Clicking will get you into the system image viewer for easy sharing and saving to some other storage location.
  • Images are sorted newest-first or oldest-first, and uploaded in that chosen order, too.

Notifications and Profile

  • You now can swipe to refresh your feed of notifications, where we will enable more and more features as we build it out.
  • The profile is now listing your recent sequences and stats.

Expert mode

  • We introduced a lot of new settings to switch off/on different modes of pausing, warnings and checks to cater for all the expert users out there.

Graphics and Layout

  • Kamil did his best to bring all the graphics and layout to a professional state. Thank you!
  • We now have changed to Material Design and will continue to work in that direction.

All in all, we think this is a worthy 1.0 release. If you encounter problems, please let us know immediately by contacting raising an issue so we can hunt down the remaining bugs - there are a lot of devices out there to support.

Happy mapping!

/peter

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