Give Your Smartphones & Tablets Some TLC
Treat your devices well – feeding them updates and leaving them with plenty of storage room will help ensure they behave themselves. Here’s our ‘3 Important Device Maintenance Rules’ to help ensure you have the best property reporting experience with our App.
1. Storage Capacity
Keep around 3GB of spare storage capacity on your devices. Our App needs this to hold all the photo and descriptions data – particularly if you’re working offline.
2. Software Updates
Always run on the most up to date software for your device (known as the operating system). These iOS and Android updates often contain fixes to bugs, security patches and new features – so running on the latest version will ensure both stability and efficiency.
3. App Updates
Update our App at the earliest opportunity when an update becomes available. Not only will it have our latest new features, but it will also include any bug fixes.
We’ve put some extra meat on the bones for the above rules – as follows….
Storage Capacity – Why It’s Important
In a nutshell, you risk losing data that’s created whilst in offline mode if the device runs out of storage capacity (online data is safe as it’s stored on our server in the cloud). This is because device operating systems (iOS or Android) will sacrifice any App data by clearing the session altogether. It does this to ensure the devices main functionality continues to work (eg making calls etc). So essentially the device will prioritise storage for use within the operating system – at the expense of any other Apps running. This often results in the user being logged-out of the App without warning. Unfortunately, when this occurs there is no way for us to retrieve the written descriptions from the offline session. However, photos are defaulted to store in the devices library as a backup (unless you have manually changed these settings within our App).
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As a rule of thumb, we recommend ensuring at least 3GB (more the merrier) of spare storage capacity is available on the device. It’s important to keep an eye on storage and maintain it – prevention is better than cure. We say this because often, devices will only warn you that storage low when it’s full or almost full (too late) and we can’t salvage offline data if the device logs-out your session without warning (beyond our control).
A tell-tale-sign the device is running low on storage is when it hangs upon login. This is because our cloud server is trying to load picture data onto the device and there’s nowhere for it to go.
When deleting pictures to free-up space you’ll also have to visit the storage settings on the device, because often they archive the pictures first and you then need to confirm permanent deletion (2 step deletion process).
Storage Capacity – How To Check
Checking Storage on iOS (Apple devices): To check your device storage visit > Settings > General > iPhone Storage.
Checking Storage on Android devices: To check your device storage visit > Settings > Storage & USB > Internal Storage.
Software Updates – How To Check
As a weekly routine check for iOS (Apple) or Android updates to the operating system, or to be extra safe – before going out with the device.
- Checking for iOS Apple Updates: To check your device for updates visit > Settings > General > Software Update (follow any on-screen prompts)
- Checking for Android Updates: To check your device for updates visit > Settings > System > System Update (follow any on-screen prompts)
App Updates – Lookout For Email Releases
The same rule of thumb applies to any of our App updates. Whenever we introduce significant updates there’s free online webinar training and news article releases (also sent via email).