Intro

Hello Mapillary Community!

My name is Yaro, and I am the Android engineer at Mapillary. I am excited to have the opportunity to introduce myself and join our amazing community.

I have been working with Mapillary for exactly one year, and it has been a truly rewarding experience. As the Android engineer, my main responsibility is to develop and maintain the Mapillary Android app, ensuring that it is reliable, user-friendly, and efficient. That’s why I am constantly looking (at least trying) for ways to improve the app and make it the best it can be for our users.

Community

One of the things I love most about working at Mapillary is the opportunity to be part of such a dedicated and passionate community. I see that members care and are proud about their contributions. I see that on the forum, in direct messages, in facebook groups, in chats. A huge difference from other projects I’ve been working with is that the community members track the progress and instantly check the result of work either an introduced feature or a bug. Mad feedback cycle I’ve never seen before. Probably the great deal to it comes from a direct relation with open communities like OSM, to whom I want to say a great thanks for all the work.

As for me, I started to work with open communities with my first Linux installation almost 10 years ago and since I was trying to support and popularize the movement. Even spent a few years writing an open source game. This involvement grew to a more regular level of being my work. It’s insane pleasure to work with an amazing team, where we are all committed to making a positive impact on the world through our work, and it is truly inspiring to be surrounded by such talented and driven individuals.

What about Android?

Through the year we’ve published 12 (suspiciously close to the amount of months) new releases to Android apps. Each release includes one more-or-less significant feature, and small fixes or polishing. I don’t want to go through the whole releases blog, but will emphasize a few things:

Localization. One of our first goals for 2022 was to increase the accessibility of our Android app to a wider audience, and I am proud to say that we have achieved this through the localization of the app into 25 languages. This has allowed us to reach users all around the world and make it easier for them to use our app in their own language.

Guest users. In addition to localization, we’ve introduced a guest user flow, which means that users no longer have to register in order to explore the app or capture sequences. This has made it even easier for people to get started with Mapillary and contribute to our community.

Seamless uploads. The feature allows users to forget about manual uploads management, and just do the best at what really matters. No more worries about phone reboots or lost internet connection, the app can do the job. This has significantly increased the reliability of our app and has made it easier for users to contribute their sequences.

Picture-in-picture capture. The work is still ongoing, but first result has been published to an open testing already. We’d like to give users the possibility to use whatever useful app they need while still capturing with Mapillary.

Stability. In addition to these user-facing updates, we have also been working hard behind the scenes to improve the stability of the app and update the app architecture. These efforts have been critical to the success of our app and have set the stage for higher impact in the future. We are always striving to improve and evolve, and we are constantly looking for ways to make our app more user-friendly and efficient.

Let’s wrap-up here and publish more next year.

Outro

We have received a lot of positive feedback this year, and it has contributed to a significant increase in both the overall rating of our app and our user base.

On behalf of the entire Mapillary team, I would like to thank you all for your support and contributions. We hope that you have a great time using our app and platform, and we look forward to continuing to bring you even more exciting updates and features in the future. I like to end with a joke, so I’ve asked ChatGPT to generate one: “Why did Mapillary's Android app have to go to the doctor? Because it was feeling a little off-line!”.

Wishing you a productive and successful year ahead,
Yaro