FishCoin for Android — 0.2 (build 13)

What's new since build 12

versionName moves to 0.2. This build is mostly repair, and most of it is about one thing: the ways a catch could go missing between your phone and us.

Superseded. This build only ever went to Play's internal testing track, which is what the rest of these notes were written against. The current build is 0.5.1 (build 19), on open testing — install it from FishCoin's page on Google Play.

Catches that never sent

A catch could sit on "pending upload" and stay there. An upload that could never succeed kept retrying every five minutes for as long as the app was running, so a catch that was never going to send just sat in the queue. A second fault could strand a catch for the rest of the session, and the only thing that cleared it was force-quitting the app. Both fixed.
A catch could read "pending upload" after it had already reached us. The fish was safe and the label was wrong, which matters more than it sounds: it invites you to send it again.

Measurements that changed their mind

A length that had already come back could revert to "Measuring…". A later update from the server carried no measurement, and the emptier answer overwrote the one you had already been shown.
Typing a tape measurement the app could not read as a number was accepted, and then lost the whole catch. Rare, but when it happened you lost everything about that fish, not just the number you mistyped.

Measure with the tail pinched to a point

The prompt now tells you the convention at the moment you enter a tape figure, instead of only in Settings: total length, with the tail pinched to a point.

This is the one item here worth going out of your way for. Your tape figure is the only real reference we have for whether the app's measurement is right, and a fish measured with the tail spread is a different number from the same fish measured pinched. A large set of tape figures taken to two different conventions is worth less than a smaller set taken to one. If you have been measuring with the tail spread, this is the build to change on.

Challenge start dates that are actually accepted

The challenge composer offered start dates up to nine days ahead and then refused them when you pressed send. It now only offers dates that will be accepted.

Under the hood

Nothing in this section changes anything you can see. It is listed so the build notes are complete, not because it is a feature.

The checks the phone runs on a capture — the ones that decide whether a photo is worth uploading at all — now use the same arithmetic as the server. The two disagreed, so the phone's opinion of a capture and ours could differ.
An upgrade path in the app's local database had never been verified. It now is.
Signing in could create a large number of unused accounts when an attempt had to retry.
Tape measurements are stored in a new record format. Existing entries are unaffected.

What would help most

Unchanged, and still first: tape-measure a fish and enter the number — with the tail pinched to a point, as the new prompt asks. It is the only real reference we have, and every one of them makes the measurements better.