S123 closing unexpectedly when looking at other apps

Question

Hi!

Lately, on iPhones with version 3.20.65, S123 has been closing unexpectedly often.

We have inspectors doing long inspections, over 30 minutes, with multiple repeat questions.

It seems like if they get a MS Teams message, a phone call, or anything where they have the S123 app in the background, it MAY stop running. Not all the time, sometimes, but regularly.

When this happens, S123 gives the recovery message... but the repeats are always lost.  This causes a lot of frustration!

Our workaround has been to save to draft after every repeat, but this adds to the time of the inspection by getting out of the form...

It worked perfectly last year... this year we run into it a lot.  (Only on iPhones, haven't seen Androids crash like this yet 🤞)

Has anyone else experienced this?

Ken

Recovered_Survey.jpg

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abureaux · Answer

I think I already have an idea up for that in the ideas thread.

Also, I brought this up directly with the devs as the recent UC and got it on their radar. They will be spending the next while looking over user feedback from UC and itemizing the requests.

As S123 is currently in the midst of a code-base change (Qt into .NET Maui), don't expect to see any big S123 changes until next year at the earliest (this is my assumption - devs don't have a timeline yet)

KenBouchard · Answer

The "Save to drafts" button is necessary, it would naturally fit into the workflow of data collection and would protect against this.

The autosave feature don't save the repeats, which is an issue.

I've started an idea specifically for the save button, we need to get it trending.  Please go add your support to it! 🙂

https://community.esri.com/t5/arcgis-survey123-ideas/s123-form-save-button/idc-p/1504771#M3022

abureaux · Answer

I've also seen similar behaviour. Our surveys can last a full day in the field, and include hundreds upon hundreds of data.

I unfortunately don't have a solution for you, but I will be bringing up two points at UC next week: 1) S123 needs a "save to drafts" button that you can press within a survey and continue collecting data, and 2) S123 autosave feature needs to be less volatile (I've had staff press the wrong button and lose everything)