Add limited connection mode

[neslihanturan]

I think most of our users might be travelling abroad and they possibly have limited internet connection. They should be able to select "limited connection mode" to prevent contribution and nearby lists from load (we can display an information string instead). So user can only upload image by using minimal amount of resources. Do you also think such feature would be nice?

[misaochan]

I think Nearby takes a very small amount of bandwidth currently. But you have a point re: contributions (although AFAIK uploading in and of itself takes a whole lot more bandwidth due to the image being full-size, compared to thumbnails for contributions). But, I'm good with this if there is a need for it, at any rate it couldn't hurt. :)

[tobias47n9e]

I think that our current traffic map also needs to get traffic information in addition to the map tiles. Not sure what impact that has.

I think Commons uploads and downloads fall under Wikipedia Zero in participating countries.

Is there a low bandwidth map we can load from mapbox?

[nicolas-raoul]

Image upload is clearly the biggest data plan eater.
Far second is probably the gallery, and third maps.
The nearby query and categories search take almost nothing.

So I think a "low-bandwidth mode" should:

• Upload picture later, only when WiFi is detected.
• Not show gallery pictures (unless they are cached?)
• Use the nearby list rather than the nearby map

[neslihanturan]

Upload picture later option is a great idea. We can even create a queue of pictures.

Mapbox supports offline maps if user has selected the area. Plus, I think we need to change our traffic map to pedestrian map in any case.

[maskaravivek]

Yes, it would be great to implement the offline support(upload later). I would be able to help with the flow and sync logic having done it for offline payments. :)

[misaochan]

Sounds good to me. :) Do you guys think it is sufficiently important/easy that we should add it to the renewal proposal? Or if it's not easy, do you think it's sufficiently important that we should remove something else to make way for this?

[neslihanturan]

Hard question. I don't think it is easy, however in my point of view it is quite important.

[maskaravivek]

I agree with @neslihanturan. Its important as in my opinion the feature to queue up pictures for upload and not waiting for the upload to complete could highly motivate users to upload more pictures

[misaochan]

@maskaravivek I think our app already queues up pictures for upload, you can upload as many as you want without waiting for the previous uploads to complete. But waiting for WiFi could definitely help in a situation where the user has limited mobile data, then he can queue the uploads for later instead of having to remember to do it later.

[neslihanturan]

Do you think it is easy to implement this feature?

[psh]

An upload queue would be a really nice addition to the app - it would be a great debug tool for us as it gives insight (and manual control of) the sync adapter & its database.

Mockup 1 - normal operation

Mockup 2 - waiting for a wifi connection

Shown in the mockups -

• Toolbar button to manually pause, or force re-start of the upload queue
• App detecting wifi state (we will need to ask users for a new permission for that)
• Ability to monitor progress of uploads
• Ability to see upload status, and kick-off a retry

If we switch the retry button for an overflow menu, that would be a place to have options to Retry and Cancel a given upload. If we add a settings menu, we could also include an Advanced option to show additional low-level details about the upload and the sync adapter (if needed).

Moving the upload status to the new screen would help simplify the contributions activity / fragment. I imagine that there will be a few new settings covering whether we want to upload using mobile data, or only wifi, and if we are interested in advanced details about the uploads.

[psh]

I believe I made a bad assumption about how multiple share works in those mockups - looking through the code I see that although I might share 5 images in a single "batch" and they land in the database with a flag saying multiple=true there isn't a concept of a upload group ID to tie them all together. Would that be something we want to add? If so, I can create an issue for it.

[nicolas-raoul]

Jun 12, 2017 Google Play review:

It would have been better if there was a resume option when the data connection fails or stops as a result of poor network. Once the internet connection is lost, It has to be uploaded again. It is time consuming and also data. Please fix it. Thank you.