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Snappy QField 3.1 “Borneo” has arrived

The launch of QField 3.0 was a big deal, but now we’re back to focusing on smaller, more frequent updates. Don’t let the shorter change log for 3.1 trick you – there are lots of cool new features in this update!

Main highlights

One of the main improvements in this release is the brand-new functionality to enable snapping to common angles while digitizing. When enabled, the coordinate cursor will snap to configured angles alongside a visual guideline. This comes in handy when adding new geometries while surveying features with regular angles (e.g. buildings, parking lots, etc.). As QField gets more digitizing functionalities, we’ve taken the time to implement a nifty UI that collapses digitizing toggle buttons into a drawer, leaving extra space for the map canvas to shine through.

In addition, the vertex editor – one of QField’s most advanced geometry tools – received tons of love during this development cycle, focusing on improving its usability. Changes worth mentioning include:

  • A new undo button allows users to revert individual vertex manipulations in case of mistaken adjustment, which can save you from having to cancel a large set of ongoing manipulations;
  • The possibility to select vertices using finger tapping on the screen, dramatically improving the user experience;
  • Clearer on-screen markers to represent vertices and
  • Tons of bug fixes to the vertex editor itself, as well as the broader set of geometry tools.

It is now possible to lock the geometry of individual features within a single vector layer. While QField has long supported the concept of a locked geometry state for vector layers, that was until now a layer-wide toggle. With the new version of QField, a data-defined property can dictate whether a given feature geometry can be edited. Interested in geofenced geometry editing? We’ve got you covered 😉 This functionality requires the latest version of QFieldSync, which is available through QGIS’ plugin manager.

Noticeably improvements

Permission handling has been improved across all platforms. On Android, QField now delays the permission request for camera, microphone, location, and Bluetooth access until needed. This makes for a much friendlier user experience.

QField 3.0 was one of the largest releases, with major changes in its underlying libraries, including a migration to Qt 6. With the community’s help, we have spent countless hours testing before release. However, it is never a bulletproof process, and that version came with a few noticeable regressions. In particular, camera handling on Android suffered from upstream issues with Qt. We’ve tracked as many of those as possible, making this new version much more stable. One lingering camera issue remains and will be fixed upstream in the next three weeks; we’ll update as soon as it is available.

Finally, long-time users of QField will notice improvements in how geometry highlights and digitizing rubber bands are drawn. We’ve doubled down on efforts to ensure that the digitized geometries and the coordinate cursor itself are always clearly visible, whether overlaid against the canvas’s light or dark parts.

We want to extend a heartfelt thank you to our sponsors for their generous support. If you’re inspired by the developments in QField and want to contribute, please consider donating. Your support will help us continue to innovate and improve this tool for everyone’s benefit.

QField 3.0 release : field mapping app, based on QGIS

We are very happy and enthusiasts at Oslandia to forward the QField 3.0 release announcement, the new major update of this mobile GIS application based on QGIS.

Oslandia is a strategic partner of OPENGIS.ch, the company at the heart of QField development, as well as the QFieldCloud associated SaaS offering. We join OPENGIS.ch to announce all the new features of QField 3.0.

Get QField 3.0 now !

QField 3.0 screenshots


 

Shipped with many new features and built with the latest generation of Qt’s cross-platform framework, this new chapter marks an important milestone for the most powerful open-source field GIS solution.

Main highlights

Upon launching this new version of QField, users will be greeted by a revamped recent projects list featuring shiny map canvas thumbnails. While this is one of the most obvious UI improvements, countless interface tweaks and harmonization have occurred. From the refreshed dark theme to the further polishing of countless widgets, QField has never looked and felt better.

The top search bar has a new functionality that allows users to look for features within the currently active vector layer by matching any of its attributes against a given search term. Users can also refine their searches by specifying a specific attribute. The new functionality can be triggered by typing the ‘f’ prefix in the search bar followed by a string or number to retrieve a list of matching features. When expanding it, a new list of functionalities appears to help users discover all of the tools available within the search bar.

QField’s tracking has also received some love. A new erroneous distance safeguard setting has been added, which, when enabled, will dictate the tracker not to add a new vertex if the distance between it and the previously added vertex is greater than a user-specified value. This aims at preventing “spikes” of poor position readings during a tracking session. QField is now also capable of resuming a tracking session after being stopped. When resuming, tracking will reuse the last feature used when first starting, allowing sessions interrupted by battery loss or momentary pause to be continued on a single line or polygon geometry.

On the feature form front, QField has gained support for feature form text widgets, a new read-only type introduced in QGIS 3.30, which allows users to create expression-based text labels within complex feature form configurations. In addition, relationship-related form widgets now allow for zooming to children/parent features within the form itself.

To enhance digitizing work in the field, QField now makes it possible to turn snapping on and off through a new snapping button on top of the map canvas when in digitizing mode. When a project has enabled advanced snapping, the dashboard’s legend item now showcases snapping badges, allowing users to toggle snapping for individual vector layers.

In addition, digitizing lines and polygons by using the volume up/down hardware keys on devices such as smartphones is now possible. This can come in handy when digitizing data in harsh conditions where gloves can make it harder to use a touch screen.

While we had to play favorites in describing some of the new functionalities in QField, we’ve barely touched the surface of this feature-packed release. Other major additions include support for Near-Field Communication (NFC) text tag reading and a new geometry editor’s eraser tool to delete part of lines and polygons as you would with a pencil sketch using an eraser.

Thanks to Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, Groupements forestiers Québec, Amsa, and Kanton Luzern for sponsoring these enhancements.

Quality of life improvements

Starting with this new version, the scale bar overlay will now respect projects’ distance measurement units, allowing for scale bars in imperial and nautical units.

QField now offers a rendering quality setting which, at the cost of a slightly reduced visual quality, results in faster rendering speeds and lower memory usage. This can be a lifesaver for older devices having difficulty handling large projects and helps save battery life.

Vector tile layer support has been improved with the automated download of missing fonts and the possibility of toggling label visibility. This pair of changes makes this resolution-independent layer type much more appealing.

On iOS, layouts are now printed by QField as PDF documents instead of images. While this was the case for other platforms, it only became possible on iOS recently after work done by one of our ninjas in QGIS itself.

Many thanks to DB Fahrwgdienste for sponsoring stabilization efforts and fixes during this development cycle.

Qt 6, the latest generation of the cross-platform framework powering QField

Last but not least, QField 3.0 is now built against Qt 6. This is a significant technological milestone for the project as this means we can fully leverage the latest technological innovations into this cross-platform framework that has been powering QField since day one.

On top of the new possibilities, QField benefited from years of fixes and improvements, including better integration with Android and iOS platforms. In addition, the positioning framework in Qt 6 has been improved with awareness of the newer GNSS constellations that have emerged over the last decade.

Forest-themed release names

Forests are critical in climate regulation, biodiversity preservation, and economic sustainability. Beginning with QField 3.0 “Amazonia” and throughout the 3.X’s life cycle, we will choose forest names to underscore the importance of and advocate for global forest conservation.

Software with service

OPENGIS.ch and Oslandia provides the full range of services around QField and QGIS : training, consulting, adaptation, specific development and core development, maintenance and assistance. Do not hesitate to contact us and detail your needs, we will be happy to collaborate : [email protected]

As always, we hope you enjoy this new release. Happy field mapping!

Strategic partnership agreement between Oslandia and OpenGIS.ch on QField

Who are we?

🤔 For those unfamiliar with Oslandia, OpenGIS.ch, or even QGIS, let’s refresh your memory:

👉 Oslandia is a French company specializing in open-source Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Since our establishment in 2009, we have been providing consulting, development, and training services in GIS, with reknown expertise. Oslandia is a dedicated open-source player and the largest contributor to the QGIS solution in France.

👉 As for OPENGIS.ch, they are a Swiss company specializing in the development of open-source GIS software. Founded in 2011, OPENGIS.ch is the largest Swiss contributor to QGIS. OPENGIS.ch is the creator of QField, the most widely used open-source mobile GIS solution for geomatics professionals.

OPENGIS.ch also offers QFieldCloud as a SaaS or on-premise solution for collaborative field project management.

😲 Some may still be unfamiliar with #QGIS ?

It is a free and open-source Geographic Information System that allows creating, editing, visualizing, analyzing, and publicating geospatial data. QGIS is a cross-platform software that can be used on desktops, servers, as a web application, or as a development library.

QGIS is open-source software developed by multiple contributors worldwide. It is an official project of the OpenSource Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) and is supported by the QGIS.org association. See https://qgis.org

A Partnership?

🎉 Today, we are delighted to announce our strategic partnership aimed at strengthening and promoting QField, the mobile application companion of QGIS Desktop.

🌟 This partnership between Oslandia and OPENGIS.ch is a significant step for QField and open-source mobile GIS solutions. It will consolidate the platform, providing users worldwide with simplified access to effective tools for collecting, managing, and analyzing geospatial data in the field.

📱 QField, developed by OPENGIS.ch, is an advanced open-source mobile application that enables GIS professionals to work efficiently in the field, using interactive maps, collecting real-time data, and managing complex geospatial projects on Android, iOS, or Windows mobile devices.

↔ QField is cross-platform, based on the QGIS engine, facilitating seamless project sharing between desktop, mobile, and web applications.

🕸 QFieldCloud (https://qfield.cloud), the collaborative web platform for QField project management, will also benefit from this partnership and will be enhanced to complement the range of tools within the QGIS platform.

Reactions

❤ At Oslandia, we are thrilled to collaborate with OPENGIS.ch on QGIS technologies. Oslandia shares with OPENGIS.ch a common vision of open-source software development: a strong involvement in development communities, work in respect with the ecosystem, an highly skilled expertise, and a commitment to industrial-quality, robust, and sustainable software development.

👩‍💻 With this partnership, we aim to offer our clients the highest expertise across all software components of the QGIS platform, from data capture to dissemination.

🤝 On the OpenGIS.ch side, Marco Bernasocchi adds:

The partnership with Oslandia represents a crucial step in our mission to provide leading mobile GIS tools with a genuine OpenSource credo. The complementarity of our skills will accelerate the development of QField and QFieldCloud and meet the growing needs of our users.

Commitment to open source

🙏 Both companies are committed to continue supporting and improving QField and QFieldCloud as open-source projects, ensuring universal access to this high-quality mobile GIS solution without vendor dependencies.

Ready for field mapping ?

🌏 And now, are you ready for the field?

So, download QField (https://qfield.org/get), create projects in QGIS, and share them on QFieldCloud!

✉ If you need training, support, maintenance, deployment, or specific feature development on these platforms, don’t hesitate to contact us. You will have access to the best experts available: [email protected].

 

QField background tracking

Years ago, the QField community and its users showed their love for their favourite field app by supporting a successful crowdfunding to improve camera handling.

Since then, OPENGIS.ch has continued to lead the development of QField with the regular support of sponsors. We couldn’t be prouder of the progress we have made, with plenty of new features added in every major release. This includes major improvements to positioning including location tracking, integration of external GNSS receivers through not only Bluetooth but TCP/UDP and serial port connections, accuracy indicator and constraints, and most recently sensors reading to list a few.

We are now calling for the community to help further better QField and unlock an important milestone: background location tracking service.

Main goal: background location tracking on Android – 25’000€

Currently, QField requires users to keep their devices’ screen on and have the app in the foreground to keep track of the device’s positioning location. On mobile devices, this can drain batteries faster than many would want to, in environments where charging options are limited.

This crowdfunding aims at removing this constraint and allow QField – via a background service – to constantly keep tracking location even while the device is suspended (i.e., when the screen is turned off / locked). 

To achieve this, a significant amount of work is required as the positioning framework on Android will need to be relocated to a dedicated background service. Recent work we’ve done adding a background service to synchronize captured image attachments in QFieldCloud projects armed us with the assurances that we can achieve our goal while giving us an appreciation of the large amount of work needed.

Some of the benefits

Running out of battery is the nightmare of most field surveyors. By moving location tracking to a background service, users will be able to improve their battery life considerably and keep focusing on their tasks even if it involves switching to a different app.

Furthermore, while OPENGIS.ch ninjas remain busy squashing reported QField crashes all year long, there will always be unexpected scenarios leading to abrupt app shutdowns, such as third-party apps, systems running out of battery, etc. To address this, the background service framework will also act as a safeguard to avoid location data loss when QField unexpectedly shuts down and offer users means to recover that data upon re-opening QField.

Stretch goal 1: background navigation audio feedback 5’000€

The second stretch goal builds onto QField’s nice fly-to-point navigation system. If the QField community meets this threshold, a new background navigation audio feedback informing users in the field of their proximity to their target will be implemented. 

The audio feedback will use text-to-speech technology to state the distance to target in meters for a given time or distance interval.

Stretch goal 2: iOS 15’000€

The main goal will cover the Android implementation only. Due to being a very low level work we will have to replicate the work for each platform we support. If we reach stretch goal 2 we will also implement this for iOS.

Pledge now:

In case you do not see the embedded form you can open it directly here.

Thanks for supporting our crowdfunding and keep an eye on our blog for updates on the status.

QField 2.8: Boosting field work through external sensors

The latest version of QField is out, featuring as its main new feature sensor handling alongside the usual round of user experience and stability improvements. We simply can’t wait to see the sensor uses you will come up with!

The main highlight: sensors

QField 2.8 ships with out-of-the-box handling of external sensor streams over TCP, UDP, and serial port. The functionality allows for data captured through instruments – such as geiger counter, decibel sensor, CO detector, etc. – to be visualized and manipulated within QField itself.

Things get really interesting when sensor data is utilized as default values alongside positioning during the digitizing of features. You are always one tap away from adding a point locked onto your current position with spatially paired sensor readings saved as point attribute(s).

Not wowed yet? Try pairing sensor readings with QField’s tracking capability! 😉 Head over QField’s documentation on this as well as QGIS’ section on sensor management to know more.

The development of this feature involved the addition of a sensor framework in upstream QGIS which will be available by the end of this coming June as part of the 3.32 release. This is a great example of the synergy between QField and its big brother QGIS, whereas development of new functionality often benefits the broader QGIS community. Big thanks to Sevenson Environmental Services for sponsoring this exciting capability.

Notable improvements

A couple of refinements during this development cycle are worth mentioning. If you ever wished for QField to directly open a selected project or reloading the last session on app launch, you’ll be happy to know this is now possible.

For heavy users of value relations in their feature forms, QField is now a tiny bit more clever when displaying string searches against long lists, placing hits that begin with the matched string first as well as visually highlighting matches within the result list itself.

Finally, feature lists throughout QField are now sorted. By default, it will sort by the display field or expression defined for each vector layer, unless an advanced sorting has been defined in a given vector layer’s attribute table. It makes browsing through lists feel that much more natural.

Capturing more while in the field with the new QField 2.7

A brand new version of QField has been released, packed with features that will make you fall in love with this essential open source tool all over again with a focus on capturing more while you are in the field. QField 2.7 nicknamed “Heroic Hedgehog” also includes a number of worthy fixes making it a crucial update to get.

New recording capabilities

The highlight of QField 2.7 is the new audio and video recording capability straight from the feature form. In addition to preexisting still photo capture, this functionality allows for video motion and audio clips to be added as attachments to feature attributes.

The audio recording capability can come in handy in the field when typing on a keyboard-less device can be challenging. Simply record an audio note of observations to process later.

The experience wouldn’t be complete without audio and video playback support, which we took care of in this version too. Playback of such media content within the feature form gives an immediate feedback and saves time. For those interested in full screen immersion, simply click on the video frame to open the attached in your favorite media player. We also took the opportunity to implement audio and video playback on QGIS so people can easily consume the fruits of their labor in the field at their workstation.

We would be remiss if we didn’t mention map canvas rotation functionality added in this version. This is a long-requested functionality which we are happy to have packed into QField now. Pro-tip: when positioning is enabled, double tapping on the lower-left positioning button will have the map canvas follow both the device’s current location as well as the compass orientation.

Finally – some would argue “most importantly” 😉 – QField is now equipped with a beautiful dark theme which users can activate in the settings panel. By default on Android and iOS, QField will follow the system’s dark theme setting. In addition to the new color scheme, users can also adjust the user interface font size.

Big thanks to Deutsches Archäologisches Institut who funded the majority of the new features in this release cycle. Their investment in making QField the perfect tool for them has benefited the community as a whole.

A ton of bug fixing across all platforms

Important stability improvements and fixes to serious issues are also part of this release. Noteworthy fixes include WFS layer support on iOS, much better Bluetooth connectivity on Android, and vertical grid improvement on Windows.

For users facing reliability issues with the native camera on Android, we have spent time supersizing the camera we ship within QField itself. During this development cycle, it has gained zoom and flash controls, as well as a ton of usability improvements, including geo-tagging.

To know more about this release, read the full change log on QField’s github release page.

QField 2.6: perfecting high-accuracy positioning

It’s only been a few weeks into the new year, but we’ve got great news for you: a brand new QField 2.6 “Geeky Gecko ?” has been released with a focus on positioning improvements, including Bluetooth support for Windows. And with that, we are delighted to remove the ‘beta’ status from QField for Windows.

New positioning features

Let’s open with a bang: QField 2.6 now supports NMEA streaming from external GNSS devices over TCP, UDP, and serial ports, in addition to preexisting Bluetooth connectivity. This new functionality means that QField is now compatible with a much larger range of GNSS devices out there.

These new receivers unlock NTRIP-driven centimetre accuracy for devices that use the Bluetooth connection to a manufacturer’s application to connect to NTRIP servers. In this scenario, QField could not initiate a Bluetooth connection since it was already taken. With the new TCP and UDP receivers – provided the manufacturer’s application offers NMEA streaming over either of those Internet protocols – QField can connect and consume high-accuracy positioning.

The presence of a serial port receiver provides support for external GNSS devices using Bluetooth on Windows via the virtual serial port created by the operating system. The lack of Bluetooth support on Windows was a long-wanted enhancement from QField users on that platform and was the last blocker for the ‘beta’ status to go away.

In addition, QField 2.6 allows users to pick from half a dozen metrics a value to attach to the measure (M) dimension of geometries being digitized when locked to the current position. This functionality is available to both users digitizing and the positioning tracker. The measurement values available as of 2.6 are timestamp, ground speed, bearing, horizontal accuracy and vertical accuracy, as well as PDOP, HDOP and VDOP values.

Growing Continuous Integration (CI) testing framework now covers positioning

Starting with version 2.6, QField ships with increased quality assurances thanks to the addition of tests covering positioning functionalities in its growing CI framework.

Practically speaking, this means that every single line of QField code changed is now being tested against positioning-related regression, significantly decreasing the risks of shipping a new version of QField with broken functionality in the area of antenna height, vertical grid shift, and ellipsoidal height adjustments.

We would like to commend Deutsche Bahn for funding the required work here. This could not have come in soon enough as more and more people are opting for QField and relying on it for their crucial day-to-day fieldwork.

How to contribute to QField

QField is a community-driven open-source project. It is free to share, use and modify and it will stay like that. The very essence of a community is to help and support each other. And that’s where YOU come into play. To make it work we need your support!

For those who don’t know much about the concept of open source projects, a bit of background. Investing in open-source projects is a technical and ethical decision for OPENGIS.ch. Open source is a technological advantage, as we receive input from many developers worldwide who are motivated to work out the best possible software. It prevents our customers from vendor lock-in and allows complete ownership and control of the developed software. And finally, not only financially independent businesses and people should benefit from professional software but also those who might not have the financial means to pay for features, and licences. 

You are not a developer, but you still like to use QField and support it? Good news. You don’t have to be a developer to use, contribute or recommend the app. There are plenty of things that need to be done to help QField to remain the powerful software it is right now and become even better. Here are a few suggestions on how you can give something back.

  1. Review the app ★★★★★ in google’s play store or apple’s app store
  2. Let the world know about it! It doesn’t matter if you’re on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram or any other social media platform. Show and tell about where QField helped you. We appreciate every post and we promise to like, share and comment.
  3. Write about your experience and please let us know. Be it in your blog or as a new success story. Insights into field projects are extremely valuable. It helps us to make the app even more efficient for your work, and it helps others to understand the range of applications for QField.
  4. Register for a paid QFieldCloud account. QFieldCloud allows to synchronize and merge the data collected in QField. QFieldCloud is hosted by the makers of QField and by getting an account you help QField too.

Do you want to do something that is more hands-on and directly linked to the app? No problem. 

  1. Help with the documentation. You can document features, or improve the documentation in English. Read the how-to guide to get started.
  2. And if you are multilingual you might consider translating the documentation or the app in your language.
  3. Become a beta tester and be the first to report a bug! When something doesn’t work properly it might be a bug. The quicker we know about it, the faster it can be resolved.
  4. You can ask and answer questions on gis.stackexchange and help others on the user discussions platform.
  5. If you are a developer and you want to get involved in QField development, please refer to the individual documentation for QField, QFieldCloud and QFieldSync.

And now finally for those of you who have the financial means, you can either sponsor a feature or subscribe to one of the monthly sponsorships. By doing so you help get freshly baked QField versions straight to everyone’s devices.

Nothing in it for you? In that case, just drop by to say thank you or have a hot or cold beverage with us next time you meet OPENGIS.ch at a conference and you might make our day!
Want to know more about the idea of community-driven open-source projects and the QGIS project in particular? Check out Nyall Dawson’s blog post about how to effectively get things done in open source!

QField 2.5 is here, reaching new heights

Our ninjas have been so busy that less than a month after we released QField 2.4, we find ourselves with so many new features we simply can’t wait any longer to present to you the latest version of QField: 2.5 “Fancy Flamingo ?”.

Exciting new features

QField’s main new feature of this 2.5 release cycle is its brand new elevation profiling functionality which has been added to the measuring tool. Users are now able to dynamically build and analyze elevation profiles wherever they are – in the field or on their desktop – by simply drawing paths onto their maps and projects.

This is a great example of QField’s capability at bringing the power of QGIS through a UI that keeps things simple and avoids being in your way until you need it. Oh and while we’re speaking of the measuring tool, check out the new azimuth measurement!

This new version also brings multi-column support to feature forms. QField now respects the number of columns set by users in the attributes’ drag and drop designer while building and tweaking projects in QGIS. The implementation will take into account the screen availability and on narrow devices will revert to a one-column setup. Pro tip: try to change the background color of your individual groups to ease understanding of the overall feature form.

Another highlight of this release is a brand new screen lock action that can be triggered through QField’s main menu found in the side dashboard or in the map canvas menu shown when long pressing on the map itself. Once activated, QField will become unresponsive to touch and mouse events while keeping the display turned on. When locked, QField also hides tool buttons which results in a more complete view of the map extent.

Stability improvements

As with every release, our ninjas have been spending time hunting nasty bugs and improving stability and QField 2.5 is no exception. In particular, the feature form should feel more reliable and even more polished.

Best of Swiss Enterprise App Award for QField

What a night it was. The “Best of Swiss Apps Awards” took place in Zurich yesterday, November 2, 2022. We were also nominated with QField. And in the enterprise category, the app was so convincing, that it was awarded the highest possible price. So it brought the award “Best of Swiss Enterprise App” home to Graubünden. And as cherry on the cake: QField was also nominated as finalist in the UX/UI category!

We are extremely proud and happy about the received award. And even more when we look at the contendants that won in the other categories. We’re talking companies like SBB, Swiss Life, Switzerland Tourism and, yes, Rivella ?.

You can check out all results at https://www.bestofswissapps.ch/bosa/hall-of-fame

If you are interested in more details, we released a press release in German and in English.

QField is an open source mobile app. The app is designed to use and edit geographically referenced data. In urban environments with 5G connectivity, but also with offline data. The mobile GIS app combines minimal design for simplicity with sophisticated technology for a versatile range of uses to bring data conveniently from the field to the offices. The app was started in 2011 and received a major rebuild in 2022.

QField is mainly funded by customer feature requests, support contracts and sponsoring and is continuously improved an released for Android, iOS, Windows, MacOS and Linux.

It offers a seamless QGIS integration and is GPS-centric, with offline functionality, synchronisation options and desktop configuration. QField is designed for fieldwork: simple, but uncompromising. The app is used internationally and is the first choice for mobile GIS projects. In the city, in the countryside and in the forest.

Soon, QFieldCloud will also be launched. QFieldCloud is a cloud service integrated into QField that enables the remote provision and synchronisation of geodata and projects.

And here some moments of the award night. It was a blast!

How we build QField for many platforms – A look behind the curtain

In the past year, the build system behind QField has been ported to vcpkg, a modern C++ dependency management system. It has been a great success for QField and considerably helped to streamline efforts, improve the development experience and to guarantee an outstanding stability of the application. In this blog post we will look at the history of building QGIS based applications for mobile systems and how it has become what it is today.

When Marco Bernasocchi (CEO of OPENGIS.ch and chair of QGIS.org) started working on QGIS for Android in Google Summer of Code a decade ago, the main job was to also build all QGIS dependencies for Android. This includes well-known libraries like proj and gdal and less-known ones like libxml2 or iconv. Each of them has its particularities and specific build flags. Working on this appears to be an endless iterative trial-and-error journey where you hope each day that eventually you will see the QGIS splash screen on your Android phone while all you see are endless lines of code and compiler errors.

As we know nowadays QGIS for Android has eventually seen the sunlight and its achievements are still the base for QGIS-based mobile apps like QField.

Sometime later we decided to modernize the build infrastructure into OSGeo4A a set of scripts where each dependency was built with a “recipe”. Modularized this way, it was easier to maintain, and general build code common for all libraries could be isolated. It was good enough to help drive QField for a couple of years, and a copy of it is still in use as the base for nowadays QGIS builds for macOS.

When we decided to make QField also available on other platforms like iOS, Windows and macOS we quickly realized that duplicating build chains scales really bad and maintaining this is an immense effort we wanted to avoid. There are a couple of existing C++ dependency management systems, none of which convinced us ultimately. Lucky for us a mail on the QGIS mailing list mentioned a new one called vcpkg which looked very promising.

A couple of days later we had a build for Windows and later in the same year for macOS. With many dependencies already available in modern versions. Cheers.

What’s left to do than just enable it for Android, and all our problems are suddenly solved? Alas, it’s not so easy. Cross-compiling is always a bit trickier. And so we started another journey to improve the situation. After a while, we had a working build chain based on vcpkg for Android in our R&D labs. Interestingly, this added a couple of features just because the community around vcpkg had already added them. For example using COG-based raster data via HTTP was suddenly working (for the record: thanks to the availability of curl which we never took care of adding ourselves in OSGeo4A).

Soon after we also wanted to try building for iOS with vcpkg, which after a few attempts also was successful, and even managed to resolve some weird crashes and other issues we had experienced with the old buildchain.

The main benefit was that we could upgrade the QGIS base libraries in one single place for every platform, in an isolated branch without playing the Jenga game on each upgrade.

The only unfinished business we still had was that support for iOS and Android was still available only in our own vcpkg fork.

So the last few weeks and months we have been working closely with upstream to bring building for Android and iOS up to the same level as desktop platforms. The relevant parts are now in a clean state.

Advantages of this approach:

  • • Mutualized efforts on all the base libraries, also with programmers outside the geoverse
  • • A vibrant community that ensures a noticeably fast upgrade of libraries
  • • A clean dependency management system
  • • A consistent set of dependency versions (gdal, geos, libpq, …) across all platforms
  • • A clean caching system that will only recompile reverse dependencies on updates
  • • We can upgrade a dependency in an isolated branch and only release it when it works on all platforms
  • • We can optimize the code for a given set of dependency versions and if a bug is fixed in a certain dependency version, we are sure we can ship this fix on all platforms promptly
  • • We maintain the QField source code as well as dependency versions in a single repository, what makes development more streamlined

Big thanks go to Alexander Neumann and Kai Pastor who both stand out for doing things the right and future-proof way.

As always, things come at a price, there was a steep learning curve involved, and some edge cases require attention. However, we are thrilled by the simplification this has brought us.

If you are maintaining a customized fork of QField, it is now a good time to start upgrading to vcpkg, since OSGeo4A has been archived and will no longer be maintained. The developer documentation of QField has been updated with relevant instructions.

If you have time to test the new build system, we will be happy to read about your experiences with it.

A New Trick up QField’s Sleeve: Animated Maps

Starting with QField 2.2, users can fully rely on animation capabilities that have made their way into QGIS during its last development cycle. This can be a powerful mean to highlight key elements on a map that require special user attention.

The example below demonstrates a scenario where animated raster markers are used to highlight active fires within the visible map extent. Notice how the subtle fire animation helps draw viewers’ eyes to those important markers.

Animated raster markers is a new symbol layer type in QGIS 3.26 that was developed by Nyall Dawson. Supported image formats include GIF, WEBP, and APNG.

The second example below showcases more advanced animated symbology which relies on expressions to animate several symbol properties such as marker size, border width, and color opacity. While more complex than simply adding a GIF marker, the results achieved with data-defined properties animation can be very appealing and integrate perfectly with any type of project.

You’ll quickly notice how smooth the animation runs. That is thanks to OPENGIS.ch’s own ninjas having spent time improving the map canvas element’s handling of layers constantly refreshing. This includes automatic skipping of frames on older devices so the app remains responsive.

Oh, we couldn’t help ourselves but take the opportunity to demonstrate how nice the QField feature form layout is these days in the video above 😄 To know more about other new features in QField 2.2, go and read the release page.

Happy field mapping to all!

The lovely animal markers used in the zoo example above were made by Serbian artist Arsenije Vujovic.

QField 2.4 is here, and it is ?icious

Yes, QField for QGIS, the leading fieldwork app, was released on the iOS App Store!

Get It now for Android, iOS, MacOS, Windows and Linux

Good things take time (and sponsors), and we wanted our Apple users to enjoy the same solid and seamless experience as our Android users. So we took the time needed and ran beta testing of QField for multiple months. Thanks to all the community feedback and to the uncountable work hours put in by our development team, today we released QField on the iOS Appstore.

Following the naming scheme for the 2.X series, we decided to name QField 2.4 Ecstatic Elk (Cervus Canadensis), honouring “the land of maple leaf ??”, the home country of Mathieu (QField lead UX designer) and origin of some recent funding.

New features, improvements and demo projects

Releasing for iOS is the main news for QField 2.4, but we also added some new features as well as fixed some annoying bugs we had.

New demo projects showing many new QField features. We merged the Bee simple and Bee advanced projects into one bees project and added a wastewater management project that comes with beautiful dark and light themes.

The new features include atlas-driven print layouts that can now be printed through the main menu’s print to PDF item and dragging files onto an iOS device via USB Cable with iTunes support.

Some more UX improvements can be noticed when sending or exporting datasets via the project folder. All sidecars will now be considered so that, for example, you can send your edited shapefiles via your favourite email or messenger app.

Finally, QFieldCloud’s projects are better sorted, and its community tab is now functional.

Bugfixes

During the last sprint, we greatly improved QField’s automated testing framework, greatly decreasing the risks of regressions slipping into future releases. We also ensured that QGIS-shipped SVG markers will now render properly within QField.

Finally, we fixed freehand toggling when using a stylus and ensured the changelog popup doesn’t overlap with the OS’ status bar.

Best of Swiss Apps Nomination

We put a lot of effort into ensuring that QField, is of the highest possible quality, so being nominated as a finalist for the BestOfSwissApps award was even sweeter ???

Beginning of November, we’ll know more about the outcome of the votes ?

QFieldCloud

QFieldCloud has been in Free BETA for half a year now. Thanks to the precious help of the many early adopters (we already have over 30K users), we were able to identify and fix plenty of issues. In the last months, our service status page has been consistently looking super-green 😉

We are extremely happy with how the system is behaving and are even happier with the feedback we are receiving!

As of today, we’ve implemented all the functionality that we want to have for the GA release. All we are missing is finishing testing the billing and payment system and rolling the drums ?

So keep on enjoying our fantastic fieldwork ecosystem, and let us know the amazing things you do with it!

Support QField

We put a lot of effort into ensuring that QField, is of the highest possible quality and invest a lot of developer time in QField, QFieldCloud and QGIS. Plenty of it is sponsored by OPENGIS.ch because we believe in giving back to the OS geo community; part is sponsored by the clients that ask us to develop features, and part is financed through our support contracts that come with a sustainability initiative.

If you think that helping QField is a good thing, go to our donate page to find out more or immediately start sponsoring QField.

QGIS out in the fields…

Wednesday the 28th of September, we’re organizing a thematic day on the field use of QGIS. It’s being hosted by VRBZO (the Fire Department in the Eindhoven region). Theme is the use of QIS in the filed, (mostly) using QField or MerginMaps. Want to join us (language will be mostly Dutch)? Tickets (free for members) […]

24th Contributors QGIS Meeting in Firenze 2022

The international community of QGIS contributors got together in person from 18 to 22 August in parallel to OpenStreetMap State of The Map event and right before the FOSS4G. So there was a lot of open source geo power concentrated in the beautiful city of Florence in those days. It was my first participation and all I knew was that it’s supposed to be an unconference. This means, there is no strict schedule but space and opportunity for everyone to present their work or team up to discuss and hack on specific tasks to bring the QGIS project to the next level.

Introduction and first discussions

We were a group of six OPENGIS.ch members arriving mostly on Thursday, spending the day shopping and moving into our city apartment. In the evening we went to a Bisteccheria to eat the famous Fiorentina steak. It was big and delicious as was the food in general. Though, I am eating vegetarian since to compensate. On Friday we went to the Campus to meet the other contributors. After a warm welcome by the organizer, Rossella and our CEO and QGIS chair Marco Bernasocchi we did an introduction round where everyone mentioned their first QGIS version ever used. At this point, I became aware of the knowledge and experience I was sharing the room with. Besides this, I noticed that there was another company attending with several members, namely Tim Sutton’s Kartoza, which is also contributing a lot to QGIS. The first discussion was about QGIS funding model, vision, communication and on the new website in planning. This discussion then moved into some smaller groups including most of the long term contributors. I was looking around, physically and virtually, and tried to process all the new inputs and to better understand the whole QGIS world. Besides, I noticed my colleague Ivan having problems with compiling QGIS after upgrading to Ubuntu 22.04 which then motivated my other colleague Clemens to implement a docker container to do the compilation. Nevertheless, I postponed my Ubuntu upgrade. That evening we went out all together to have a beer or two and play some pool sessions and table football. Finally, the OPENGIS.ch crew navigated back home pairing a high-precision GNSS sensor with a mobile device running OpenStreetMap in QField. We arrived back home safely and super precise.

First tasks and coffee breaks

There was catering in the main hall covering breakfast, lunch and coffee breaks. It never took long after grabbing a cup of coffee to find yourself in a conversation with either fellow contributors or OpenStreetMap folks. I chatted with a mapper from Japan about mobile apps, an engineer from Colombia about travelling and a freelancer from the Netherlands about GDAL, to name 3 coffees out of many.

QGIS plugins website

After some coffee, Matthias Kuhn, our CTO and high-ranking QGIS contributor, asked me whether I could improve some ugly parts of QGIS plugins website. So I had my first task which I started working on immediately. The task was to make the site more useful on mobile devices which would be achieved by collapsing some unimportant information and even removing other parts. I noticed some quirks in the development workflow, so I also added some pre-commit hooks to the dev setup. Dimas Ciputra from Kartoza helped me finalize the improvements and merge them into master branch on github.

QGIS website downloads section

Regis Haubourg asked to help simplify the QGIS Downloads for Windows section on the main QGIS website. We played around in the browser dev tools until we thought the section looked about right. I then checked out the github repo and started implementing the changes. I need to say the tech stack is not quite easy to develop with currently, but there is a complete rework in planning. Anyway, following the pull request on github a lively discussion started which is ongoing by the time of writing. And this is a good thing and shows how much thought goes into this project.

Presentations

There were many interesting and sometimes spontaneous presentations which always involved lively discussions. Amy Burness from Kartoza presented new styling capabilities for QGIS, Tobias Schmetzer from the Bavarian Center for Applied Energy Research presented the geo data processing and pointed out issues he encountered using QGIS on this and Etienne Trimaille from 3liz talked about qgis-plugins-ci, just to name a few.

Amazing community

On Saturday evening a bus showed up at the campus and took us on a trip up to the hills. After quite a long ride we arrived at a restaurant high up with mind-blowing view of the city. I forgot how many rounds of Tuscan food were served, but it was delicious throughout. An amazing evening with fruitful conversations and many laughs.

The weather was nice and hot, the beers cold, the Tuscan food delicious and the contributors were not only popular Github avatars but really nice people. Thank you QGIS.

QField Users Sit Down, We Need to Talk About Storage Access on Android

TLDR: Since November 2021, Google has enforced new storage access limitations for apps published on its Play store which prohibits direct storage access on Android 11 and above forcing QField to adapt and rely on importing projects and datasets to access those.

If you are a QField beta user on Android 11 and above, you might have noticed a significant change in the way the app is handling storage in the latest set of betas released in early February of 2022. This blog post will go over the changes, explain why those had to be made (looking at you, Google), how to work in this new paradigm, and showcase some new benefits from the hard work done by OPENGIS.ch’s geoninjas.

It’s all gone! How can I access my projects and datasets?!

Starting with Android 11, apps are denied full access to main and external storage content. For QField, this means direct access to projects and datasets transferred and/or downloaded into storage folders is not possible anymore.

To work within this new confine, QField now has to import project folders or individual datasets into an app-dedicated storage location where Android allows for unrestricted read/write access.

Practically, this means that instead of being shown and having access to the full storage tree when clicking on the “Open local files” button, users are now shown a set of new folders named ‘QField files directory’, ‘Imported datasets’, and ‘Imported projects’ as well as a drop-down menu accessible via a top-right three-dot button.

The drop-down menu lists the means to import projects and datasets: import project from folder, import project from ZIP [archive], and import [individual] dataset(s).

Import project from folder

When importing a project from a folder, users will be asked to grant permission for QField to read the content of a given folder on the device’s storage via a system folder picker. When the folder is selected, QField copies the folder content (including its sub-folders) into the app’s ‘Imported projects’ location. Users can then open the project from there.

Re-importing a given folder through the drop-down menu action will overwrite preexisting projects given an identical folder name. That allows users to be able to update projects.

Note that feature editing, addition, and deletion will be saved into the imported project’s datasets, not in the original folder selected during the import process. More on how to find and handle those project datasets will come later in this post.

Import project from ZIP archive

Having to adapt to Google’s new set of rules did not come without its benefits. Users can now easily transfer projects into a given device by compressing the project content into a ZIP archive and having QField import that compressed project automatically. This can greatly ease remote deployment of projects by being able to send a single file to users.

Import dataset(s)

QField can also import individual dataset(s). Users will be asked to select one or more files via a system file picker, which will be copied into the ‘Imported datasets’ folder. Users will have to ensure that all sidecar files are selected when importing (e.g. a shapefile dataset would require users to select the .shp, .shx, .dbf, .prj, and .cpg files).

Just like imported projects, editing of datasets will be saved into the imported datasets, and not reflected in the original files.

Alright, but how can I retrieve modified projects and datasets?

Imported projects and datasets can be accessed directly using a USB cable. The location on storage is displayed in the top navigation bar when opening a local file.

On most devices plugged into a computer via USB cable connection, the path will be <drive>:/Android/data/ch.opengis.qfield/files/ where you will find both the Imported Datasets and Imported Projects folders within which your edited content will be located.

However, we’ve also added a nice new ‘Send to…’ functionality that allows for users to share and send datasets straight from QField using Android APIs. This allows for the sending of edited datasets directly to third party apps (Gmail, Drive, Dropbox, Nextcloud, your favourite messenger app, etc.).

Is direct copying via USB cable gone altogether?

Users can still avoid going through the import process by copying files via a USB cable connection directly into the QField app’s files directory. As mentioned above, the location on most devices will be <drive>:/Android/data/ch.opengis.qfield/files/.

What are the benefits from these changes?

Working out a functional solution to meet Google’s newly-enforced restrictions did not come without its benefits.

On top of what was already covered above – importing of compressed project ZIP files and sharing functionalities – QField is now fully integrated with Android’s cross-application document sharing APIs. This means that users can now directly open projects and files sent to them via their favourite browser/email/cloud/messenger app without the need to first download those files onto the device.

Altogether, the newly-coded importing mechanisms and integration with Android document APIs don’t only improve the ease of use for the average person, it also makes viewing and editing spatial datasets on QField far more secure. The imported projects and datasets reside in a location with access limited to QField only, meaning that its content is inherently far more protected from malicious access from third-party apps.

Why were these drastic changes needed?

As mentioned in the introduction, the changes were needed to comply with a set of new Google Play policies that came into force in November 2021. Users can read more on Google’s rationale on this page https://developer.android.com/google/play/requirements/target-sdk.

As part of the enforcement of these new policies, Google came up with an arbitrary mechanism to whitelist some apps which allows those to retain full storage access given the user explicitly allowed for it. We here at OPENGIS.ch believes QField had ample justifications to be whitelisted, however, Google’s appeal process judged otherwise after a series of email exchanges detailing our reasoning. While we have so far lost this argument with Google, we will continue fighting for our users and for their freedom to choose. If by any chance you have a good contact at Google that might be willing to listen to our reasoning, we would be grateful if you’d get in touch with us.

We hope this clarifies the recent changes and helps QField users adapt to those.

QField collected data crucial in disaster relief after Tonga’s volcanic eruption

For once, it’s not an app from the Silicon Valley, but from Laax in the Swiss Alps that made the news. By publishing QField as an open-source app, OPENGIS.ch allows companies, organisations and even countries without the necessary financial means to have the opportunity to benefit from this important data collection app. And it is being used: Over half a million downloads have already been achieved. Now, since the volcanic eruption in Tonga on 15 January 2022, the app of the small Laax-based company is playing a not-unimportant role in disaster response planning. 

We’ve only been around for seven years. We could almost pass for a start-up. But OPENGIS.ch is already a household name when it comes to field data collection. OPENGIS.ch makes its field mapping tool QField available without restrictions (i.e. open-source) so that companies or even nations can collect their geographical data. In this way, data is brought from the field to the office and provides important insights for future decisions.

This was also the case for Tonga’s volcanic eruption. There, in December 2021, many relevant agricultural datasets were captured with “QField” and “QFieldCloud”. This currently helps the Ministry of Agriculture, Food, Forests, and Fisheries to analyse the damage after the volcanic eruption and the subsequent tsunami and plan the response.

Swiss software in use for Tonga

It is a technical and ethical decision for me. I want not only the privileged nations to benefit from our work.

Marco Bernasocchi, CEO

Co-founder Marco Bernasocchi’s credo is to focus on further developing the product (QField). OPENGIS.ch makes it freely available, so that nations like Tonga, with little financial means, can use professional software and invest their financial resources in reconstruction. “It is a technical and ethical decision for me. I want not only the privileged nations to benefit from our work. We are always developing the product and generate income mainly from support, paid developments and custom solutions. Our product, however, is publicly accessible”. This strategy is successful: the company is 90% financed by Swiss customers but the app is used all over the world. “Open source is a technological advantage for me. This way we get the input of many developers worldwide who are motivated to work out the best possible software. This leads to a superior product and is particularly valuable to me.,” adds Matthias Kuhn, co-founder of OPENGIS.ch.

This way we get the input of many developers worldwide who are motivated to work out the best possible software.

Matthias Kuhn, CTO

John Duncan, project manager at the University of Western Australia, who is working on the project in support of Tonga, explains the work done in December like this: “the workflow uses QField to map the extent of landscape features including agricultural fields and cropped holdings, recording detailed attributes about each feature’s farming system. QFieldCloud was used to support large teams of data collectors tasked with surveying every tax allotment across Tonga. The initiative has resulted in the detailed mapping of cropping and livestock systems for over 11,000 farms across Tonga’s three main island groups. These datasets provide actionable information for short-term decision making around food security, agricultural planning, and disaster response, and are a valuable resource for longer-term monitoring of agricultural and environmental changes in these climate-vulnerable locations.

The data was originally intended for food security and agricultural planning. But now they suddenly have acquired enormous value and can be used for disaster response planning. 

John Duncan, University of Western Australia

Further information on QField in connection with Tonga: 

Media articles

About OPENGIS.ch

OPENGIS.ch GmbH is a Swiss software development company based in Laax. OPENGIS.ch employs 19 people and works mainly in the field of spatial software development, geodata infrastructure deployments and professional support. Personalised open source GIS solutions are often planned and developed as desktop or mobile applications. OPENGIS.ch finances itself through tailor-made customer solutions, professional support and adaptations. Link: https://opengis.ch

OPENGIS.ch team in Summer 2021 company retreat

About the OPENGIS.ch product “QField” application

“QField” is an open-source app developed for efficient fieldwork in real-time in urban areas, with 5G connection or with offline data. The mobile GIS app combines a minimal design with sophisticated technology to conveniently bring data from the field to the office. Seamless QGIS integration, GPS centred, offline functionality, synchronisation capabilities, desktop configurable: “QField” is designed for fieldwork – simple but uncompromising. Link: https://qfield.org

About the OPENGIS.ch service “QFieldCloud

“QFieldCloud” is a spatial cloud service integrated into “QField” that allows remote provisioning and synchronisation of geodata and projects. Although “QFieldCloud” is still in an advanced beta stage, it is already being used by many groups to significantly improve their workflows. Link: https://qfield.cloud

QFieldCloud now opensource – Happy 10 Years of field mapping with QGIS

Today, on QField’s 10th anniversary, we’re extremely proud to publish the results of over 18 months of development and give you the source code of QFieldCloud to go and make your awesome adaptations, solutions, and hopefully contributions 🙂

If you want to quickly try it out, head to https://qfield.cloud where our hosted solution is running and secure yourself a spot in the beta program.

QFieldCloud’s unique technology allows your team to focus on what’s important, making sure you efficiently get the best field data possible. Thanks to the tight integration with the leading GIS fieldwork app QField, your team will be able to start surveying and digitising data in no time.

QField git history
After 10 years of OPENGIS.ch giving to the QGIS community, here is our latest present. Happy birthday #fieldmapping with QGIS https://github.com/opengisch/qfieldcloud/pull/3

What a journey it was and what plans do we already have… It has now been 10 years since I pushed the first scripts to build Quantum GIS for Android and it is incredible what we’ve been able to achieve thanks to a vibrant community, sponsors and especially our fantastic team.

At OPENGIS.ch we strongly believe in giving back. We live from open-source projects and are deeply committed to sustaining their technological and economic well-being. We also believe everyone should have access to the best possible tools and knowledge. By committing ourselves to develop open-source applications, we give everyone access to powerful tools to plan, review and mitigate geospatial issues.

That is why we are even more thrilled to have created and open-sourced a professional data and team management solution for the best QGIS fieldwork app and would like to share a bit of the history of how we revolutionised field work by creating QField for QGIS.

Prehistory – QGIS for Android is born

Stone-, bronze-, iron-age, you get it, the beginnings of field mapping in the QGIS world were pretty rough around the edges. It all started thanks to me being accepted in the Google Summer of Code 2011 programme with the “QGIS mobile” submission. In the following 3 months, I’d try, with the help of my mentors Pirmin Kalberer and Marco Hugentobler, to get Quantum GIS to run on my tablet.

The first start

Hi all, it is a pleasure to announce that I finally got Quantum GIS to start on an android (3.2) tablet (Asus transformer). I tested as well on a Samsung Galaxy phone with cyanogen mod 7 RC1 and it works well (with the obvious screen size limitations).
Qgis still doesn’t load many elements, but the GUI is there and the rest should be only minor issues. I’ll post more as soon as I make further developments. Meanwhile, if you want to test the apk, you can download it from my GitHub here. For building your own, have a look at qgis wiki

https://www.opengis.ch/2011/08/17/qgis-on-android/
The first ever video about QGIS on Android

A proper GUI

See my last posts. In short, I managed to get qgis packaged as an APK and to properly run with only one major problem. The map canvas is always black. I’ll investigate this till Tuesday.
Cheers

https://www.opengis.ch/2011/08/18/qgis-on-android-has-a-proper-gui/
After 3 months of intensive work, QGIS for android finally has a a proper GUI

Blazing fast startup

Hi, I just managed to create an APK with all the resources needed by qgis …

The only inconvenience at the moment is that at the first startup the app shows a black screen while it’s copying the files for about 30 to 60sec so just be patient and remember that the whole app will take up to 230MB (it installs on external storage by default)

https://www.opengis.ch/2011/08/19/qgis-on-android-has-complete-gui-and-supports-translations/

A working reality

I still remember the feeling that day when after almost 3 months, of fighting with shell scripts, patching of build systems, debugging via ADB, writing C++ in Java wrappers and so on, my Quantum GIS test project was suddenly running on my tablet… I Was so happy I just went running in the mountains :).

Just a quick screenshot to show that qgis on android is now a working reality. Tomorrow I’ll make a video and so on. The major missing thing now is reading SHP files ad maybe spatialite… maybe tomorrow. Now it’s Sunday 😉

https://www.opengis.ch/2011/08/21/qgis-android-works-2/

GSoC 2011 results

At the end of the Google Summer of code, I received my MSc in geoinformatics and left for 3 Months to Indonesia working as a consultant/developer for the World-bank Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery.

So, it is over, after 3 months of working on QGIS for android as a Google Summer of Code project it is now time to wrap up what I did and didn’t do.
First of all a QGIS android app exists now and it has many features including:
– reading/writing projects
– raster support
– spatialite support
– WMS support
– (apparent – untested) WFS and Postgres support
– partial shape files support (string attributes still crash the app)
– Fully functional GUI (SymbologyV2 doesn’t work yet)
– (all?) core C++ plugins beside globe (any takers? 😉)
Furthermore, I created a series of build scripts that make it easier to set up a dev environment.
Unfortunately, I didn’t manage to implement live GPS tracking and a larger GUI optimisation, but all in all, I’m very happy with the results and seeing that few peoples are already testing it. Soon ill publish a video.
cheers

https://www.opengis.ch/2011/08/24/gsoc-2011-final-report/

Quantum GIS for Android was a reality and I was fully committed to keeping working on it. Turns out I wasn’t wrong 🙂

A commitment is a commitment 🙂

Classical – QGIS for Android grows

The Next Era of QGIS for android is what could be seen as the time of great knowledge enhancement, philosophical musings and the rise of the first great features including:

Middle Ages – QGIS Mobile

The dark ages, times of instability, change and some setbacks. Sounds terrifying, it was not at all, on the contrary it was a very formative period that apexed with the fantastic release of QGIS 2.0 for android.

The QML app experiment

From the beginning on, the idea behind QGIS for android was to eventually ditch the GUI and build a dedicated one for touch devices. The code for the future.

The Python failure

Probably the major setback in QGIS for android’s history was the non-completion of the Python support. I got really close to it multiple times but unfortunately never managed to tame the snake. Maybe something we’ll look into in future, who knows.

The QGIS 2.0 release

The pivotal point of the Middle Ages was definitely 20.09.2013, when Tim Sutton presented to a full auditorium the shiny new QGIS 2.0. And along with it it introduced the general availability of QGIS 2.0 on android. The first real QGIS version for mobile devices was finally available for the broad public.

After the launch followed a very active time of keeping QGIS for Android on pair with the desktop versions leading to a regular release of updates on the playstore between 2013 and late 2014. This is also when Matthias Kuhn started committing to the QGIS for Android repository.

Early Modern – QField for QGIS is here

Humanism, Renaissance and Enlightenment are what we saw happening in the period between 2015 and early 2019. Field users were put at the centre of the design process, new ideas were explored and a new name was chosen to reflect the main goal of the application: Make fieldwork as efficient as possible.

Early 2015 was also when Matthias Kuhn and myself decided to join forces in OPENGIS.ch LLC.

The rebranding

The project never had a clear name, at times it was called QGIS for Android at times QGIS mobile, we felt that to clearly convey what we were building we needed a clear, simple and poignant name.

Beginning of 2015 saw the last rebranding

It is with great pleasure that we want to announce the new name for what was briefly known as QGIS mobile.

Please welcome QField for QGIS™!

After long thinking about various names and variants including QGIS mobile, QTouch, OPENGIS.ch QGIS mobile, QWork, and many more, we felt that QField represents best what we want to archive. A field data capture and management app fully compatible with QGIS™.

https://www.opengis.ch/2015/01/28/qgis-mobile-is-now-qfield/

QField Experimental is out, after a couple of months of requirements gathering, private early alpha testing and foremost tons of  emails requesting access to the testes group we decided today to put the current BETA version in the playstore.

https://www.opengis.ch/2015/06/15/qfield-in-the-wild/

Streamlined installation

Since the beginning of QGIS for android, to distribute the needed Qt libraries, we used a project called “ministro”. This was interesting because it allowed to download the libraries only once but on the other hand, it was a very painful experience for the user that needed to install a second app before getting QField to start. Around the end of 2015 it was so far, we finally managed to get rid of that dependency and make the installation process as streamlined as possible.

It’s done, finally we managed to get rid of Ministro so that we finally can say, QField runs on any android from 4.0.3 (ICS). This makes as of today (according to google) 96% of the android installations worldwide.

https://www.opengis.ch/2015/12/01/qfield-for-android-5/

Release candidates

In these 3.5 years, a continuous, mainly volunteer-driven iterative process led by Matthias Kuhn made QField grow to the point where we felt confident it was time to launch QField 1.0.

After a series of release candidates with lots of feedback from the community, we felt it was time to move into a New Era.

It was a long and winding road but we are very excited to announce the general availability of QField 1.0 Release Candidate 1.

Packed with loads of useful features like online and offline features digitizing, geometry and attributes editing, attribute search, powerful forms, theme switching, GPS support, camera integration and much more, QField is a powerful tool for those who need to edit on the go and would like to avoid standing in the swamp with a laptop or paper charts.

https://www.opengis.ch/2019/01/08/qfield-1-0-rc1/

Modern times – QField 1.X

Fast forward to March 28th 2019,

Let’s get straight to the point

It’s official, QField for QGIS 1.0 is out!

Get it while it’s hot on the Playstore (qfield.org/get) or on GitHub

We are incredibly pleased and proud of just having released such a jewel and are convinced that thanks to all its features and conscious design choices, QField will make your field digitizing work much more efficient and pleasant.

https://www.opengis.ch/2019/03/28/qfield-1-0-is-here/

Recent releases

In the last 2 years the development pace increased tremendously, the sponsored featured grew as never before, QField rating skyrocketed to 4.7 ⭐ we currently have 100’000 active users and we’re getting around 500 new users every day.

Our QField core team grew more and now thanks to David Signer’s lead and Mathieu Pellerin keen eye for UX we’re pushing QField even further.

Going into all releases would be so much information that this post would turn into a 3 volumes classic, and since starting from QField 1.0 we’ve documented each new release, we’re just going to link them: https://www.opengis.ch/category/qfield/highlights/

The future is cloudy – ehm sunny of course 😉

Yesterday we published QField 1.9.6, which is going to be the last 1.X release and will put QField 2.0 into the beta channel so that every beta tester can start using QFieldCloud without having to use the developer version.

But that is a different story and you can read all about it in our latest newsletter

Powerful and gentle QField 1.8 Selma sneaked in

Get fieldwork smoothly and nimbly done despite the ice and snow outside. Collect accurate data with freehand digitizing and improved form widgets, use the data from your external GNSS receivers without any third-party apps and enjoy the pleasant usability of QField 1.8 Selma.

This year started off hi-speed for us. There’s been already a lot of coding, designing and teaching, and we’ve thrown ourselves into these things we love to do. And we published another QField release last week that I completely forgot to announce in this blog. But here it is. It’s QField 1.8, Selma. And it’s packed with cool features.

Let’s have a look.

Freehand drawing

This might be a feature that brings a lot of fun and professionalism to your work. The freehand digitizing mode allows the user to “draw” lines and polygons with the stylus pen. The mode is available for adding line/polygon features as well as for the ring tool of the geometry editor.

Together with the powerful options in the topological editing where you can snap to existing features and avoid overlaps, it’s very convenient to digitize complex shapes.

Zoom in and out

Speaking of fun. One day, a guy from the QGIS community asked us if we could implement the functionality to zoom in and zoom out like he is able to do with an app called Maps from a company named Google. I didn’t know what he meant, but he explained: Single finger double tap-and-hold zoom gesture (which allows you to zoom smoothly from anywhere on the screen). Wow! Didn’t know it before, but it’s super neat! So we made it available in QField as well.

If you are used to it, it’s quite easy. But for beginners it can be a bit difficult. So for people who are not that deft – and to keep the UX self-explanatory and simple – we also added two buttons + / – to zoom in and zoom out with just one finger. So now even a clumsy pirate with a hook instead of a hand can collect data with QField 🙂

Powerful Relation Reference Widget

Let’s be a little bit more serious and talk about how powerful the relation reference widget has become.

View and Edit selected feature

The intuitive eye icon next to the widget lets you open the form of the referenced parent feature to view and edit it.

Autocomplete mode

When auto-complete is enabled, you can easily perform a search in all available parent features.

autocomplete

With space-separated input, you can search for the beginning of multiple words in the display name of the parent features. So in this example searching for “Ma” will find the name “Mae” and “Marie” and using the second word “buck” it finds the Buckfast bees – so the entries containing both values will be listed on top.

Integration of external GNSS receivers

In case you wondered, why we did not release 1.8 Selma earlier? Because we wanted to have it feature loaded and rocket proof. And one of this cool feature is the integration of external GNSS receivers.

QField can receive and decode NMEA sentences received via Bluetooth from an external GNSS receiver (such as an EMLID Reach RS2) without the need for any third party app.

nmea

Search for paired Bluetooth devices in the device settings, connect to the external device and receive the GNSS information.

Select vertical grid shift files

In the QField settings, you can select a grid file on your mobile device by placing it in a directory named QField/proj in the main folder of the internal storage to increase the vertical location accuracy.

Postgres Config File

If you once started using PostgreSQL configuration files, you don’t want to live without them anymore. And when you use it on your PC, I’m sure you want to use it on your mobile device as well.

Define Postgresql services in a pg_service.conf file and use it on QField by placing it directly in a directory named QField in the main folder of the internal storage.

Add reload data button

The layer properties have been polished and in addition, you will find a button to reload the layer data. This is especially useful if you use WFS layers from which you need to get updates.

nmea

Register extra fonts

Also, you can add TTF and OTF font files into a directory named QField/fonts at the main folder of the internal storage to use the nice fonts you like.

fonts

How beautiful is that!

Support of new raster file formats

By the way: Many new raster file formats are supported – most notably COG. While not yet supported as remote format streamed directly from the web, it is also a high performance format if used locally

What about the cloud?

You might be one of these people eagerly waiting and always receiving the same message: Keep calm, it’s coming soon. Sorry for that. But when we do something, we do it right. And we prefer to have a stable solution than to publish half baked stuff. We are still highly busy coding, testing and promoting QFieldCloud. It’s announced for this spring / early summer.

Also, keep an eye on the @QFieldForQgis and @QFieldCloud twitter accounts to stay updated.

We ♥ our Beta Testers

The Beta Testers are our secret heroes. They report bugs and inconveniences before the normal users are bothered with them. Thanks to the Beta Testers QField is so stable. And at this point we would like to say: Thank you, test heroes!

And what do the beta testers get in return? Well, they can be the very first to try out the great new features. This is exciting and fun. So don’t hesitate. Join the beta.

In the Play Store you should find this section under the “QField for QGIS” app listing. Enjoy the feature frenzy and report the problems at qfield.org/issues

And if you wondered…

… why this release is called “Selma”. It’s of course because of the Mount Selma in Australia… And because it’s the name of my beloved cat. That’s her – Selma Eulenkopf – staring at me while I’m coding QField.

QField 1.7 Rockies hits the stage

Be ready for the cold weather with a smooth coordinate search, filters in the value relation widget, fancy new QML and HTML widgets, enhanced geometry editing functionalities and an expandable legend. Right when Autumn starts, QField 1.7 Rockies hits the stage.

As usual get it now on the play store or on github!

The days are getting shorter and the wind blows colder. It’s always good to be in a good company outside while getting your mapping work done. QField will be your reliable companion.

We know, QField 1.6 Qinling has only been out two months and with its amount of new features and stability improvements, it would have deserved a longer primetime. But we just couldn’t withhold you all the new great stuff we’ve been building lately.

So let’s welcome QField 1.7 Rockies. And yes, we mean THE Rockies, where QField is looking for plenty of new buddies.

Let’s have a look.

Merging features

Splitting of a feature has been possible for quite some time. Now the merging of features of multipolygon-layer is possible as well. Select them and merge them – easy like that. The first selected feature gets the new geometry and keeps its attributes.

Filters in the Value Relation Widget

The value relation widgets provide an easy selection of a related feature. Often it’s used for lookup tables but sometimes the related tables contain a lot of entries and the list of the possible values is long.

Using filters in the value relation drop-down can increase the efficiency in selecting the correct value. It can be configured by expressions in QGIS, so it’s possible to have the content of the drop down depend on the values entered previously in other fields.

In the screenshot above there is a Map Value Widget with “forest” and “meadow” as values. On selecting “forest”, only the trees appear in the Field “Plant Species”. On selecting “meadow” there would be listed flowers instead.

Go to coordinates in the Search

The search has not only been improved in its appearance, but it’s handling is much more comfortable with a button to clear the text and easy opening and closing.

Additionally, we added the possibility to jump to coordinates. Searching a place you know the coordinates of is now super simple. And this means that digitizing that precise geometry with known coordinates is finally possible.

coordinates

QML and HTML Widget

You might remember when we introduced the QML widget in QGIS. Now it’s in QField as well. And it’s not alone. HTML widgets are supported too.

This provides a lot of possibilities to display information with texts, images and charts and it even allows you interaction.
Do you need help setting up complex forms? Don’t hesitate to get in touch with us!


Expandable legend icons

The legend items are now expandable and collapsible.

Wait a minute… Wasn’t this possible before? Yes. It was possible in earlier versions. But why it’s announced here as a new feature?

Because now it is built in a future proof manner thanks to all the people and organisations who care for QField and bought a support contract with the sustainability initiative or committed to a recurring sponsorship.

Some technical background: As you may be aware QField uses QGIS under the hood and QGIS uses Qt under the hood. Qt is currently used in version 5. Qt 5 is not that young any more and has a lot of functionality which is no longer supported by Qt. The old legend was based on the tree view, a deprecated module. Using it had some implications like the suboptimal support of HiDPI. Furthermore, these deprecated modules will disappear in the soon-to-come Qt 6.

As you can see, keeping QField at the quality we and you expect requires a lot of maintenance work. It is of utmost importance and only possible thanks to sponsoring since paying for fixing already existing features is less attractive for most people.

What will the future bring

In the last weeks, we have been highly busy on coding, testing and promoting QFieldCloud and we are very happy to be able to announce it very soon. So be prepared.

Also, keep an eye on the @QFieldForQgis and @QFieldCloud twitter accounts to stay updated.

Open Source

QField is an open source project. This means that whatever is produced is available free of charge. To anyone. Forever. This also means that everyone has the chance to contribute. You can write code, but you don’t need to. You can also help translating the app to your language or help out writing documentation or case studies or by sponsoring a new feature.

And now…

… enjoy QField 1.7 Rockies and have a nice autumn!

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