sensorly

How is RootMetrics able to do it then?

If they show the signal strength in the app, I don't know how they do it since there are no public APIs for that.

Hi everyone,

What's available is some indication of the radio access technology. But we still don't have signal strength so we wouldn't know whether to draw  dark purple or light purple

Fix for "French" being shown when it shouldn't is being distributed by PlayStore right now

We ditched google maps because we wanted a background over which we could see the map colors: the coloreful iOS and Android backgrounds don't work because we've got too many colors and nuances. (The new SDK we use actually costs money and yes we use OSM. If you know of a better alternative, let us know !)

The new map SDK is actually much much faster than the old one, we're just having a big traffic spike because of the gigaom article, we'll be back to normal tomorrow.

We'll looking over the other comments this week to see how to improve the app based on feedback.

Thanks

Hi everyone's we've just initiated a rollout to 20% of our user base after getting great feedback from everyone and working hard the past couple of days. It's been great getting so much help in so little time, let's do it again !

If anyone is still interested in helping us beta test upcoming releases (there will some this week), we'll be glad to have you onboard.

Thanks

Hope you guys made it multiview compatible with Samsung phones.

 

Sent from my SPH-L710 using Tapatalk 4

I put in the multiview stuff in the manifest, let me know if it works

The look is nice, it feels kind of classy. When I go to the compare screen and click on map, I get a big red box over a gray screen. Other than that hiccup, it is nice. I wish you could select between WiMAX, LTE, HSPA+, etc instead of just 4G, though. The speed tests actually get sent. On the old app, they never got sent for some reason. I have an HTC Evo 3D.

Can you send a screenshot through the group of that compare issue ?

We're going to put back WIMAX tomorrow, sorry about that.

That's it for today. Thanks for joining. Let us know if you run into anything fishy

"That's it for today. Thanks for joining. Let us know if you run into anything fishy"

Hi everyone,

We've been beta-testing our new Android V3 app for the past week and we're ready to open it up to more testers to increase the odds of finding a bug before we launch on Monday. So if you're around right now and would like to participate, read on...

What's new

• new greyish map background to make the coverage maps easier to read
• following our traditions of quick updates, we're introducing "blazingly-fast-to-update-speedtest-maps" : when you run a speed test, it's available to everyone as soon as it's uploaded to the server
• we've added a news feed that we use to give important metrics about the area you're viewing like : best speedtests, latest speeds, distribution of speedtests, etc
• we've redesigned everything to be cleaner, cripser & more in line with modern Android guildelines
• and we still have our nifty compare feature to see who really covers an area the best

How to participate

We want to keep this to S4GRU members so please reply to this thread with a "me", then head to https://groups.google.com/d/forum/sensorly-beta-testers-android and request an invite. Add a link to your "me" post in the message.

I'll be up for a few more hours (we're in Europe) to accept requests so don't take too long

The app works with any Android phone running 2.3 and up.

Here are some screeshots, enjoy.

I forgot to say it looks much nicer without the "no coverage" gray all over the maps now.  It's much easier to see where there is LTE mapped now.  It also made making the monthly comparison maps easier since I didn't have to remove it myself.

It seems that everyone agrees with you

Would love to and we would the minute they did but I just looked at the pre-release iOS 7 APIs and I don't see anything to that effect. Has anyone found anything in their docs ?

Thanks for everyone's kind words.

We just implemented a slight improvement to the LTE maps : they're drawn down to the pixel now whereas they used to be drawn to 2-pixels. It's subtle but once you notice it looks much better. Not all parts of the maps were updated, only the main markets because there's too much to redraw. But if you collect data and look at the map a couple hours later, you will see it. We redrew about 16 millions map parts yesterday for that.

Also, I changed the CDN config : LTE tiles are now cached only 2h max with a 30minute expiry time for the browser so even if you visit a map area in the morning, you should see the updates at noon.

And if they kept track of the Basestation IDs in the points and made click able maps where we could see what BID provided that coverage that would be down right awesome!

Hey digiblur, we can do that. Next time you have stuff like that, pop me an email. We can't always do it immediately but we can sometimes and now is a good time.

I like the idea of the base station based on the latitude,longitude provided by the network, will try to add it in the next release.

We also collect the 1x signal and its SID, so you're saying it would be useful to have a separate map, but why ? Sorry if I'm being thick but it's hard to follow all conversations.

For Sprint on 1x, if the SID is in the 224xx range, then you are on the 800mhz SMR band. This is also how the app Signalcheck determines what band you are on.

How does that relate to LTE ? The radios are distinct, why would that be the LTE band ?

Probably so.. Unless they can figure out how to read the band.

 

I wish they would do a 800smr map since our phones report 1x correctly even when on LTE and they could just read the 224xx SIDs and put them on a map. Seems pretty easy and I am sure Sprint would be interested in seeing it themselves.

Can you explain more on this ? What is the purpose of getting the 1x SID ?

Updates are still fast. We added a CDN to improve the speed at which tiles load in the browser and it's set to keep tiles in cache for 24h for now so you won't see updates for up to 24h. App doesn't do that.

This is my Sensorly strategy as well. I can confirm Sensorly definitely averages data at each point.

We average measurements and give priority to "upper" layers so if we get grey (no LTE) for 6 months and then get 1 reading with LTE, we'll display LTE there. And from there on, it will average out with other "LTE present" signal measurements but ignore the "no LTE" measurements that might come in.

The issue is that LTE is reported as a "telephony network" so we have no way of knowing what the underlying "real" telephony network is.

Maps didn't update for the past 12 hours, investigating why. Backlog is "down" to about 2 million pieces of maps to update, it will probably finish over the night as this is peak hour.

Anyone else being blocked from sensorly.com with a "Forbidden" error?  I cannot get in from a browser, although I can see coverage maps on my GS3 using the Sensorly app.

Is it still the case now ?

Hmm, I don't have that experience. The terrain around my part of San Diego is very hilly, and Sensorly's colors track pretty close with Signal Check's numbers, the tower locations and the terrain. I wonder if it's a matter of different hardware versions or radio software?

 

Have a great day,

John

Take a look at our "Details" screen, you'll get the signal strength coming from the phone there too

To the sensorly rep:

 

Ever since the new Jelly Bean update on the Motorola Photon Q, the mapping functionality (note, *not* the app itself) keeps 'crashing' of a sort....basically, the process seems to halt/hang or something.  On an active mapping process, the spinning circle to the left of the 'elapsed time' timer will continue to spin, but the timer itself will suddenly flip to all zeroes and points cease accumulating regardless of whether you're mapping 2G/3G CMDA signal or 4G/LTE signal. Passive mapping processes will similarly 'crash' and the notifier/status bar icon at the top disappears when this happens (I have mine set to always scan passively anyway when vehicle docked)..  

 

And as one other additional oddity, I went into my app settings after I got home this afternoon and noticed that oddly, it shows 'Battery usage today' reporting at 1272% (no, that's not a typo, it literally shows 1272% right now).  I'm not sure if that is interrelated or not, but I know its downright impossible.  I had even uninstalled/reinstalled the app a few days ago, and even if that value wasn't being reset daily, I haven't used even half that much of a cumulative battery charge over the last few days since then.

 

There's a thread on this here where others with the P-Q are experiencing the same issue:

 

http://s4gru.com/index.php?/topic/3748-sensorly-freezing-on-my-photonq/

Can you send us an email to contact@sen...ly.com and we'll work on this. We want to start a new beta cycle at the end of the month and now is the time to work on this !

I did a car dock passive scan this afternoon. Still has yet to update. Hmmm.

 

Sent from my Android HP Touchpad using Tapatalk 4

There's no backlog right now so either you're hitting the CDN 24h cache thing (web only) or there's something wrong !

Hi everyone, a couple updates :

• we're serving the maps through a CDN on the web now. The CDN caches map tiles for 24 h. This is currently only on the web. Have you experienced improved speed over the last 2 weeks ?
• we've optimized our map updates yet again since this morning. You should see your updates even faster now (minutes); of course, to see them you need to use the Android app. And by the way, there's a little caching there too so to make sure there's no cache involved, exit & restart. Can anyone confirm updates are indeed faster ?

Thanks

None of the LTE I mapped over a week ago, or last night is showing. Is it possible there is an issue with the HTC ONE?

If you still don't see your data now, it's quite possible yes. In which case, send an email to contact@sen... with your phone's anonymous id. Clear your browser cache before testing.

Good news

• CDMA maps are now up-to-date and updating in near real-time.
  
• LTE maps are up-to-date including data from 6 hours ago.