Hi All --
-- I know that there have been various threads, and also the help page
https://confluence.dimagi.com/display/commcarepublic/Recommended+Phones+and+Choosing+a+Phone
... that can help confirm that phones and tablets will work with commcare.
-- But the table on that help page only discusses a few tablets. And, more
generally, I am starting to suspect that Android, and the commcare product,
are now sort of "mature" enough that I could assume that a newly released
samsung tablet -- for example the P355 and P555 that I can get over here in
thailand... will "very probably" work with commcare?
-- In other words, wouldn't it be odd if a newly released samsung tablet or
phone were not able to work with commcare? Has that happened recently?
-- perhaps a "very budget" model would be an exception?
I ask this because I sense that the two avenues to confirm compatibility --
both the help-page with a table of models on it, and also "asking in the
commcare group about a certain model" ... are both sort of unrealistic
methods, as nobody has the time to check all these new models...
thanks
Eric
Eric,
Generally it is safe to assume that any new Android device from a trusted
manufacturer will run CommCare. Samsung devices, in my experience, have
been particularly reliable second only to the Nexus line. If we discovered
that a new device from one of these manufacturers didn't run CommCare
successfully we'd treat this as a high priority bug that's our
responsibility to address.
You're only really likely to get into device trouble buying devices from
fringey manufacturers that either aren't compliant with all Android
standards or have shoddy SD cards resulting in lots of data corruption (I
believe the latter is the source of the majority of our device related bugs)
Best,
Will
···
On Wed, Feb 10, 2016 at 4:33 AM, Eric Stephan wrote:
Hi All --
-- I know that there have been various threads, and also the help page
Recommended Phones and Choosing a Phone - CommCare Public - CommCare Public
... that can help confirm that phones and tablets will work with commcare.
-- But the table on that help page only discusses a few tablets. And, more
generally, I am starting to suspect that Android, and the commcare product,
are now sort of "mature" enough that I could assume that a newly released
samsung tablet -- for example the P355 and P555 that I can get over here in
thailand... will "very probably" work with commcare?
-- In other words, wouldn't it be odd if a newly released samsung tablet
or phone were not able to work with commcare? Has that happened recently?
-- perhaps a "very budget" model would be an exception?
I ask this because I sense that the two avenues to confirm compatibility
-- both the help-page with a table of models on it, and also "asking in the
commcare group about a certain model" ... are both sort of unrealistic
methods, as nobody has the time to check all these new models...
thanks
Eric
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This is great info. Just to round it out, could you list a handful of the
manufacturers that you tend to see as trusted? For example -- samsung and
any nexus phone of course. But... What about Asus, Huawei, HTC, LG... any
thoughts on the trusted ones? Thanks!
Hey Eric,
Unfortunately it's hard for us to really give particularly generalized
recommendations on this. We only have experience with a few specific models
of phones, and don't want to bias or make wide claims we can't back up.
There are two major problems we see with phones, one is odd API
implementations (unexpected file paths, or weird permissions) that are not
easy to anticipate, and the other being occasional issues with the flash
storage on some devices being somewhat volatile that we haven't found a way
to anticipate.
I think from most of the big name manufacturers we've had relative stable
experiences with the exception of some Huawei devices (issues with storage
at the lower end and issues with the file system being set up in odd ways
on others). I wish we had a more stable way of testing, but the universe of
devices changes so fast that it's ~impossible to keep up. The storage
issues are also uniquely challenging in that there's no way to test flash
storage volatility without basically writing it down until it breaks, so we
can only really catch them after the fact.
-Clayton
···
On Wed, Feb 17, 2016 at 9:54 PM, Eric Stephan wrote:
This is great info. Just to round it out, could you list a handful of the
manufacturers that you tend to see as trusted? For example -- samsung and
any nexus phone of course. But... What about Asus, Huawei, HTC, LG... any
thoughts on the trusted ones? Thanks!
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Thanks ---
I think I am likely to hang on to my "just stick with samsung" reflex...
One colleague was looking at an Asus tablet as a possible procurement, and
I guess i would want to test on one before doing a large purchase...
eric