Mobile app lags and crashes are one of the last things you want to be dealing with during an inspection, but they can come up from time to time! Usually they are caused by just a few simple things.
Before we dive in, know that we've coded our app so that every single tap is saving data to the device, which means you're not losing data when the app crashes. Phew!
In general, we recommend restarting your device and clearing your app data often!
➡️ If you don't have time to read the whole article, check out our checklist summary at the bottom!
🆕 If you're having crashes while taking a photo after updating to iOS 14, please write into the chat bubble so we can help you optimize your settings.
Memory
Our developers have spent a lot of time looking over our error logs, and it turns out the majority of crashes are caused by memory issues!
Your device has something called memory or RAM. Memory is the amount of data the device can handle at one time. Not to be confused with storage, which is often in the hundreds of gigabytes (256GB), memory is usually a single-digit number of gigabytes (4GB, 4GB) for modern devices.
Most crashes are "out of memory" errors! To avoid these, here's what you can do:
Use a device with 4GB or more of RAM. Most modern high-end devices have 4GB or more. We see the most crashes when RAM is 4GB or less. A quick Google search of your device's name + RAM will let you know how much you have!
Have less apps open while you're doing inspections. Make sure you're closing apps, and not letting them run in the background!
Make sure you're powering your device down every now and then. We recommend at least once a week!
Use our mobile app's Settings > Reset App Memory every once in a while to keep on-device data to a minimum. The more data the app has to sort through constantly, the more memory it takes! After making sure you don't have any unsaved inspection data, follow these steps:
Photos
We notice issues as more and more photos begin to accumulate in your device gallery, especially when you're adding photos to an inspection from your gallery! More than 2,000 photos in your device gallery can cause issues loading photos to add in the app, and with memory!
The photo plug-in within the Spectora app is going to try to see all the thumbnails within your photo gallery, so if you have more than 2,000 photos, you're probably overloading it while taking a picture.
To see improvements, make sure you're clearing out photos that you don't need anymore as they start to get up there. Don't forget to delete the photos from your Recently Deleted folder, too!
Templates
Any time you log into the mobile app, we pull in all the templates available on your account so they're ready to use if needed. If you have a lot of templates and not much device memory, this often leads to lag or crashes when the mobile app tries to parse all your template data.
Delete unused templates from you account if you don't use them at all.
Here's a checklist to make sure you've got everything!
➡️ Make sure your device has at 4GB of RAM or more.
➡️ Restart your device and clear app data often.
➡️ There aren't more than 2,000 photos in your device gallery.
➡️ Clear unused templates from your Spectora account.
That's it! Please keep in mind that crashes happen on all apps, especially ones that are dealing with large amounts of data like us! In our experience, these crashes are usually caused by one of the issues above, so check them out for a crash-free inspecting experience. If the typical fixes don't seem to be working for you, please let us know and we will see what we can find!
If you have any questions on this, or other parts of Spectora, write into our chat bubble or email support@spectora.com!
