DroneDeploy iOS Version 4.2 Bugs

You’d have to email support (support@dronedeploy.com), but they supposedly they “deactivated it on certain hardware” so it may not be possible to do yours. They told me it was my iPad 7th Gen and the iPad Mini 4…

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Anyone with prior app problems having any success now? Have some gigs coming up shortly and want to make sure things are good to go. Haven’t had a chance to test do to the weather (here in WI), and my main concern is not knowing the battery status during flight. Have a lot of acreage to fly and it’s cold.

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I was told that the new UI was disabled on certain models (iPad 7th Gen and Mini 4) so if it shows up in your device you should be good to go. It turns out that they think the trouble was related to updating to iOS 13 so I need to see if they can re-enable my device model.

So I did have the new UI until very recently (never had a chance to test it), but it no longer appears on my iPad mini 4 running DD 4.2.1. It reverted back to the old IU. Do I also need them to re-enable my device?

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Version 4.2.2 is expected to be released by end of next week and includes additional fixes to speed up new UI (both for dashboard and in-flight) on older devices. We appreciate your patience.

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I have the newest (7th gen) iPad so it’s not older devices. James already explained that it was a problem with iOS 13 so it wasnt just a lack of horsepower. Will devices be re-enabled at that release?

@MichaelL Most likely yes.

Worth noting our data shows iPad Mini 5 is a great choice with A12 chip. iPad 7th gen was released with the iPhone 7 A10 chip.

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Using DD 3.18.1 works perfectly on an ipad air2 (A8X) ios 12.3 (well, except for the skipped photos with the p4p).

I expect there are a lot of users that need some performance or feature benefit to make a case for new hardware.

What is the actual benefit to the user for using v.4.x ?

Thanks MichaelL for the response to my inquiry
I have been following this thread for some time and with some angst as well, although saw Andrew’s response on the iPad Min 5 w/A12 chip so will be looking at that as an upgrade

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All, good morning from Texas! I was prompted for the iOS 13.3.1 update on my 7th Gen 10.2 this morning so I went to read the Release Notes and noticed that there are several line items regarding kernel corruption and improved memory handling. I will be chatting with DD this morning about turning my new UI access back on and I will update my iPad to see how it works and will report back.

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Version 10.2?
Mine is saying 4.2.1 on my iPhone…
is it different on an iPad or what do you mean?
Regards

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10.2 is the size of the 7th Gen iPad instead of 9.7in.

4.2.1 is the version of the DroneDeploy app.

13.3.1 is the latest version of iOS (operating system) available on the iPhones and iPads.

… my life :smiley: sorry

Thought you were updating to 10.2…

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Pretty ugly weather in Central Texas. Looks like a couple of days until we can fly. @Andrew_Fraser, can I get the new UI turned back on please?

My situation is not an exact parallel, but I flew a small (3.5 Acre) mission yesterday with my Mavic Pro using an iPad Air 2 for display. (Reading this thread, maybe I need an updated iPad.) The mapping portion of the flight went as well as I could hope for until the last 3 minutes. At that point, the positioning display was running about 30 seconds behind, the picture counter was not updating and it felt like the drone returned early. (To add to the confusion, the map planning showed 21 minutes flight time would require 2 batteries.) When the drone landed, the DD screen showed that I had taken 200 pictures. When I actually did my upload, I had 346 pictures.
Then I tried to fly three panos. The first one seemed to go off without a hitch. However, when I ran the other two, as soon as I selected the checklist, it moved the center of the pano to the location of my first pano. (This was directly overhead.) I let the second pano fly figuring the display might be showing the assent line (I am fairly new to panos) but the drone went up to altitude (140) and started shooting the same pano. It only shot pics for 30 seconds before aborting and landing. No reason was given. At the time, the RC was showing 4 or 5 bars. I tried the third pano I had setup, but again, as soon as I selected the checklist, the center of the pano moved tot eh location of the first pano. Ultimately, I only got the one pano. I am open to any suggestions here.

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All pretty much sounds spot on to me except that you caught another bug (or lack of functionality) that has actually been around for a while - pre 4.x. Technically the ability to go from pano to pano or any consecutively flight plans does not exist yet so the only way you can do back-to-back is to shutdown DroneDeploy and start the next mission. As you may have seen in other threads we are expecting to get consecutively missions pretty soon.

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I’ve been having a miserable time trying to get the DD app to run on my ipad mini 4. This morning the login button won’t even work. Doesn’t say I have a bad password, just sits there and doesn’t respond when I click login. Last time I went out and flew (about a week and a half ago now) with our phantom 4 pro v2, we had all the same problems everyone has been describing. Update lags, or complete freezes in the display. Flight 2 took several retries and restarts to get launched, then spent an hour trying to restart and reboot everything in various sequences and finally gave up on flight 3, we couldn’t even get the drone off the ground.

DD seems to be claiming their stats don’t show any special problems, but I suspect when the app starts failing, it also stops being able to report in and so their internal stats are probably significantly skewed on this one, or they are just playing down the significance, or maybe they honestly don’t know how badly this is hitting people?

For me the DD app has become 100% uttterly unusable on a 1-year old ipad mini, even at home on fast wifi. :frowning: Frustrating because that was the app I picked after testing out several options and I was looking forward to using the new terrain aware features.

Edit: now the DD app stops responding usefully halfway through typing my user name and won’t take any more characters. (I’m running the most recent v4.2.1 I believe.)

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Were you on WiFi or just mobile? I have had issues in the past if I was on mobile and the WiFi was on, but there were no connections.

Unfortunately the Mini may be new to you, but the model is almost 5 years old. I don’t think that is the main problem though. What version of iOS are you running now?

I’m trying to run the DD app on my wifi at home, this model of ipad doesn’t have a mobile data connection. The version of IOS just updated itself recently, so it is 13.3.1 It claims it has 128Gb of storage (most of that is still available), but I don’t see any place where it reports the amount of RAM available.

Thankfully the pix4d capture app still works great on this device as does the sentera field agent planning app so I’m not completely dead in the water for mission planning. I liked some of the DD app features, but they aren’t mission critical for me. We I don’t use DD for making the maps so I had to let my paid subscription expire after trying it for a year.

I’m not a mac person I guess … we got the ipad mini brand new about a year ago through our university store. It was my first experience with an apple device (since my apple IIc in college) … I assumed the ipad was of recent vintage because we bought it new … we liked the form factor, not too big, not too small. Someone knowledgeable at the time thought it would be a good match and recommended it to us. The only thing we use the ipad mini for is flying our phantom 4 pro v2, outside of that it sits in the case with the rest of our gear.

It really caught me off guard last time we went out to fly, the DD app updated itself to the 4.2.0 version and we started having all kinds of issues. We had been flying great in weeks previous to that update. I updated to 4.2.1 when I got home from the failed flying session, but that just seems to have made everything that much worse. :frowning:

If it truly is an issue with the ipad mini 4 and I’m the only guy left in the world running one, then I guess I don’t blame DD for not worrying too much about it. But I was just surprised how quickly this went down hill for me.

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The M4 has 2GB and the M5 has 3GB. Same thing from the 6th to 7th Gen full size.

They are definitely worrying about it and will be postponing the retirement of the old UI if it doesn’t get resolved. Does yours still have the option for the old and new UI’s?

It sounds like iOS 13.3.1 hasn’t solved the issues by itself so we continue with the theory that it was a combination of the iOS and DD updates, but I stick to my opinion that the new flight interface is heavy and and that’s why devices were getting blamed. My new 7th Gen is practically the same as the 6th Gen 9.7, but has new software and 1GB more of RAM so I don’t know how it could be to blame.