Latest Contributions by JeffShaner

Hi Kristan, We have not done a very good job of communicating our positioning on the Windows platform with our native runtime apps and I apologize for the frustration this has caused. To be frank, we have been struggling to determine the right path forward ourselves. Apologies again for this brain dump but I want to share where we are today and provide you with as much detail as I can.  Some Background Info Our core field apps, Collector, Explorer, Navigator, Workforce and Tracker are built using the native runtime SDKs for each platform (Swift for iOS, Kotlin for Android, .NET/UWP for Windows). We build our software this way so that we can squeeze out the best experience possible using the device OS you are investing in. Our developers are organized primarily by platform and language but our devs are pretty amazing and most can switch context and work on iOS or Android platforms. The rest of our product team (QA/doc and to some degree design) are agnostic of platform. As you have mentioned above though, it has taken us 2 years to build the Aurora version of Collector on the iOS/Android platforms.  What have we been doing on Windows? Last year we built and released Explorer on the windows platform. Why Explorer and not Collector? For 2 reasons: 1. Customer requests. A number of our key sectors were asking for a Windows Mobile-based mapping solution that supports mounted in-vehicle Windows devices as well as tear away use in your hand tablets. Functionality needed to support all of the online/offline map viewing capabilities of Collector and provide the ability to redline/sketch on top of the map.  2. Windows Mobile Hardware and development environments for Windows. We saw promise with the new Surface tablets and their ability to be used in the field. The cellular-enabled Surface Go tablet appeared to be a strong competitor to the 10inch iPad with built-in GPS. Microsoft promotes using UWP as their development environment for touch-screen tablets and our field apps are designed for tablet and smartphone form factors. It seemed like a good fit for us to design a hold in your hand and vehicle-mounted user experience and we could focus on map navigation, search and sketching to start with. What about Collector? Building the field data capture experience that Collector has and integrating with external GPS receivers on a Windows platform is a much higher bar. In the time we have built the Explorer app, we have been following the trends in development environments for the Windows platform and UWP has come into question, and then there is the market need for Collector on Windows too. We monitor adoption by each platform as best we can. We use a combination of store metrics, login events to ArcGIS Online, and conversations with our sector sales team, support and directly with customers like yourself to make our decisions.  What you see here is a sampling of login events (when someone logs into their organization) with Collector starting in January until now. Blue is the android platform, green is the iOS platform, and orange is the Windows platform. As you can see, iOS is quite dominant, Android is somewhat of a close second with Windows a very distant 3rd. Does it warrant continued investment in staffing a development team for the Windows platform? One that we struggle with.  But it is just a single data point and not enough to make decisions from. In fact, over the course of the past 6 months we have seen a spike in interest for Windows devices in the field and that is quite telling. Perhaps it's due to change management where Windows 7 based devices are phased out and new Windows 10 devices are being phased in? When we ask customers some say they are moving away from Windows devices because they are too costly and then when we talk to other customers they say they are phasing out iOS devices to streamline costs and the organization wants to institute a one device policy. Where do we go from here? We are evaluating our path forward from a development and resources perspective. We want to talk to learn more about your needs on the Windows 10 platform to make sure that we are not missing important information as well. A while back we posted a blog article talking about our "pause" in development on Windows and requested customers email esriApps4Windows10@esri.com and provide us with additional details/engage in a dialog with you. We need your feedback and we want to know details on the devices you use, how many of them you have, how you use them (mounted or handheld), what workflows you are using them for, etc.  Thank you. Jeff ... View more