Mobile Release 1.16 – Geolocation and Android Changes

If you’re a large, distributed organization, the physical location of where an event takes place can be a critical piece of information. With the 1.16 release of the DevonWay app, targeted to hit the Apple and Google app stores by mid-June (we’re skipping Microsoft for this version), observations can optionally capture geolocation information. The app defaults its best guess of the device’s location, which the user can then adjust by dragging the pin to a more exact location, similar to how the Uber app works. 

The geolocation information is transferred back to the server with the observation, and can then be used in reporting or posted to your data warehouse. Note that we don’t yet have a default “Maps” view in the search screen, but one is in the works! 

For more information on how to enable this feature, please contact support. 

Secondly, you may already know that we’re hard at work integrating the best-of-breed PSPDFKit annotation tool into our mobile app. Because this requires integration at the native OS level, and because our enterprise customers currently only use iOS and Windows tablets in a Production environment, we are removing support from Android for viewing and annotating PDF documents in mobile work packages until we’re sure the business demand is there to justify the investment. This keeps us from having to maintain two separate annotation codebases, which ultimately translates to a higher quality, more reliable experience for our users. Of course, Observations and Mobile Documents (Forms) are still fully supported on Android devices. 

If you have any questions about this upcoming mobile release or anything else, please contact us!