Let’s not paraphrase it, QField 2.0 is here and it is taking professional GIS fieldwork to a completely new level.

TL;DR

After an intense development and testing period, we are ready, QField 2.0 is out.

QField 2.0 is packed with new features that will make your professional fieldwork even more efficient. You can get a taste of all you will be getting with this major update on QField’s changelog. Be aware, it will blow your mind…

If you do not have it yet, get it now!

Work efficiently – Be anywhere – Open anything

Survey and digitise data in no time. QField is the professional mobile app for QGIS, allowing users to deploy their existing QGIS projects to the field.

Edit your data on the go. The seamless integration with QFieldCloud allows your team to work on your projects anywhere anytime.

Open a wide range of spatial data formats, connect to industry-leading spatial databases and consume standardised geowebservices.

The looks out of the and sees lots of

For Android, iOS and Windows tablets and mobiles. But also for Linux, macOS and Windows laptops and desktops.

QField can be installed basically anywhere and can help thanks to its simplicity even on desktop work.
If you do not have it yet, get it now!

What mountain is Arctic Fox?

If you have been following QFields development, you might remember that we named each release after a mountain. We are very outdoorsy and this was a sort of tribute to the places we love. With each release, we had great fun looking for places that would be meaningful for us and our community. From beautiful mountains outside our window to the remotest island mountain on Earth and even further.

After Elbrus (0.5), Finsteraarhorn (0.6), Gonnus Mons (0.7), Hiendertelltihoren (0.8), Jungfraujoch (0.9), Kesch (0.10), Lucendro (0.11), Matterhorn (1.0 – 1.2), Ben Nevis (1.3), Olavtoppen (1.4), Piz Palü (1.5), Qinling (1.6), Rockies (1.7), Selma (1.8), Taivaskero (1.9) and Uluru (1.10), we decided to change the subject and for the 2.X series we’ll name the releases after cool animals that reflect different characteristics of QField.

The arctic fox is an incredibly hardy animal that can survive frigid Arctic temperatures as low as –50°C in the treeless lands where it makes its home. It has furry soles, short ears, and a short muzzle—all-important adaptations to the chilly clime. Arctic foxes live in burrows, and in a blizzard, they may tunnel into the snow to create shelter.

Like an Arctic Fox, QField is perfectly adapted to the outdoors and helps you get your data in the most efficient way possible.

Ah yes, and they seem to be pretty good navigators and tech-savvy too: https://www.space.com/arctic-fox-epic-journey-satellite-tracking.html

Packed with new functionalities

Obviously, the big news in QField 2.0 is the integration with QFieldCloud BETA, but besides that, we’ve added a lot of new features and fixed plenty of bugs. If you are interested in all the details, you should go to the changelog page and check out all the new goodies. If you just want the major additions, here you go:

• – Support for the opening of projects and datasets directly from your favourite messenger app, browser, etc. on Android.
• – Support for opening ZIP compressed projects on Android.
• – Support for remote datasets via GDAL’s /vsicurl/ URIs
• – Greatly improved scale bar overlay
• – Incremental improvements to the user interface all across QField

Cloudy with a chance of meatballs

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 QField, you will be able to start surveying and digitising data in no time.

Some of you may already have been part of the closed BETA testing phase. THANKS!
For all the others, great news, QFieldCloud is now officially in open BETA.

You can register directly from QField 2.0 or simply head to qfield.cloud and create your free account now.

What is QFieldCloud?

Seamless synchronisation

QFieldCloud is a synchronisation platform, that we offer as a service, which takes the pain out of syncing data from multiple data collectors. Thanks to seamless synchronization, your surveyors will be able to push their work anytime they want. Working in the wild? Your team can continue working with no limitations and sync back their changes once back in town.

Team management

QFieldCloud’s fine-grained permissions system allows you to efficiently define who can collaborate with you on your projects and what operations they are allowed to perform. You can for example add a junior surveyor as a reporter, a senior one as a project manager and you can even add users with read-only permissions.

Hosted or in your own cloud – open source

QFieldCloud perfectly integrates and extends your QGIS based geodata infrastructure, you can either subscribe for a worry-free Swiss-made solution hosted on Swiss data centres or contact us for your private cloud instance.

QFieldCloud code is open source so you can see what is actually happening to your data.

Known issues

Please note that on older AMRv7 architectures, some devices are suffering from a crash at launch. As such, we have not yet updated QField to 2.0 for these devices. If you own one such device and want to manually download and install QField, please visit the release page on GitHub.

Also, 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. 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 believe 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 you are interested in more details, read our blog post about it.

Join the effort

QField is an open-source project. It is free to share, use and modify and it will stay like that. We are very happy if this app helps you in whatever creative way you may use it. If you found it useful, we will be even happier if you could give something back. You can easily sponsor QField, contribute some help or ask us to develop a new feature.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

Editing multiple features at the same time, support for stylus pens, dynamic configuration of image names and much more.
QField 1.6 Qinling 秦岭 comes packed with awesome new features and an improved user experience.

We have been very busy over the last few months working on a new and shiny QField release. We have added many new features that increase efficiency on the field or allow for new workflows. In parallel, we have also been working on ironing out a series of issues and improving the overall user experience to make the app as pleasurable to use as possible. The result is QField 1.6 which has been published now.

Enough of the highlevel talking, let’s see what has been done.

Multi editing

Do you recall Geography lesson 101, Toblers first law? Everything is related to everything else. But near things are more related than distant things.

Very often there are similar objects nearby which share a property, tree species tend to group, human created objects like street light types or street paint markings tend to be of the same type at the same location.

With QField 1.6 it is now much easier to select a couple of features and change an attribute with very few taps. Identify a feature, long press an identify results, select more features and click the edit attributes button.

Stylus support

Sometimes it is just too cold to be working with fingers (although of course you can get capacitive gloves too). Or you just prefer to be working with a pen. QField 1.6 comes with support for stylus pens. If your device ships with one, give it a try.

Lock geometries

For some scenarios, especially in asset management, you only need to change attributes of existing objects and never add new features, delete features or change geometries. This can be configured through QFieldSync and set in the layer properties.

Image name configuration

Did you ever want to have the file names of your pictures to match the feature id, the layer name or any free text? The expression based configuration in QFieldSync offers now complete freedom in naming your images.

Legend and UX and legacy code

Didn’t expect to read UX and legacy code in one single title?

QML is the technology on which the QField user interface is built. QML ships a lot of user interface elements in a library called “Quick Controls”. A long time ago already it received an update from version 1 to version 2. Up to recently we still have been using some elements from version 1, which had an effect on high resolution displays not being able to properly display everything. To workaround that we introduced a lot of band aids, to improve the situation. We are very happy, that by migrating the legend and few other remaining elements to Quick Controls 2 in version 1.6, we have been able to completely drop this code.

Topological editing

QGIS can detect shared boundary by the features, so you only have to move a common vertex once, and QGIS will take care of updating the neighboring ones. So does his little college QField since this release.

Fast editing mode

For the real adventurers who know what they are doing this release brings the fast editing mode. In this mode, the features will automatically be stored on every change. The user interface is lighter and it combines perfectly with the topological editing.

Unter the hood

We have brought the whole technology stack up to speed with modern requirements. Proj and GDAL have been updated to recent versions. This helped to mitigate a couple of issues with coordinate transformations that were completely misplaced. It also paves the path for a future with datum corrections and always more important high precision measurements.

Known Issues

Unfortunately, we are experiencing a crash on startup with 32 bit devices. These devices are not that common any more, but if you have a device that is already a couple of years old it’s very well possible that it comes with a 32 bit cpu builtin. Despite the team’s hard efforts to isolate the reason, we were not able to find out what it was yet. Because of this we will not be able to update to 1.6 for these devices at the moment. We still hope that we will find a solution for this but don’t know yet when this will be.

We have updated proj to version 6. This brings plenty of bug fixes with coordinate handling. Among other things it adds support for using datum grids (gsb files) for very precise transformations, it is not yet possible to install those on the device. You will get an information message in the about dialog if your project happens to fall into this category. In this case, as a workaround switch the CRS of the project to a CRS with a known conversion that works without grid files.

What will the future bring

You guessed it already, we are not tired and have plenty of things stacked for the future. Prepare for more exciting updates for attribute forms and also for QFieldCloud which is right now being tested in our R&D labs.

Also keep an eye on the @QFieldForQgis Twitter account 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.

Thanks to sponsors

Various organisations have helped to make this new release become a reality. Without the support of people in organisations who believe in the future of QField and open source tool for geospatial in general. The whole team behind QField would like to thank you with a big applause!

What a year’s start! After a very packed December publishing all the QGIS on the road videos and quietly releasing QField 1.3 – Ben Nevis we could have gone and relaxed over the holidays. But since we love QField so much we immediately started working on the next iteration. Now, after an intensive testing period, we are proud to announce the release of QField 1.4 – Olavtoppen.

Olavtoppen!? yes, the highest point of Bouvet Island, the remotest island on Earth. And sure enough, QField would follow you there!

As usual, get it on play store or download it from GitHub.

QField Crowdfunding Campaign

Before digging into all the new goodness that you will find in QField 1.4, let’s get a big “Thanks” out to everybody who supported our crowdfunding campaign for improved camera support and all our customers that agreed to open source the work we did for them.

If you like QField, want a new feature or would like to support the project, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us.

Usability enhancements

In QField 1.2 we started to improve on the usability of the user interface. We are constantly working on this with a usability expert to get the user interface to be even more appealing and user-friendly.

Besides lots of clean-up and polishing, QField received two major improvements, a portrait mode and a new welcome screen with recent projects.

Welcome screen with recent projects

QField is all about efficiency. While favourites folders in the file selector already give a great productivity boost, very often we work with the same 3-4 projects. This is why we redesigned the welcome screen to list the last five project used. And if you look carefully you might get a hint of what will be coming soon…

Portrait mode

QField now flawlessly works in portrait mode. We heard you say you needed a comfortable way to work in portrait mode, especially on smartphones. QField forms and button placements are now optimized to be easy to use with your thumbs.

New features

We keep on listening to your feedback and prioritize new features based on it. We did implement some minor features like allowing hiding legend nodes and printing to PDF using the current extent. But this time’s superstars are three highly expected features: Splitting of geometries, compass integration and, yes you guessed right, native camera and gallery app support!

Split Features

A new editing tool is available that allows for splitting existing features. This adds an even more powerful operation to an already impressive geometry editing tools set.

Compass integration

A long-awaited feature! QField now shows you on-screen in which direction you are looking, walking, driving, flying or warping direction. This makes it much easier and more pleasant to navigate in the field.

Native Camera and Gallery

It is now possible to use your favourite camera app so that you have more control over how pictures are taken. It is also possible to select pictures which are already on your device by using the new gallery selector.

Pro Tip: You can use any camera app. For example, you can use the open camera app to create geotagged photos if your preinstalled system camera doesn’t save positioning information in EXIF data.

Pro Tip 2: You can use an image annotation app to add notes, sketches, drawings and so on to your images and then choose them from QField via the add from gallery button.

Antenna Height Correction

For high precision measurements, it’s possible to compensate your altitude by a fixed antenna height. This will then automatically adjust all the digitised altitude values.

JPEG 2000

Support for JPEG 2000 raster datasets was added. This lossy format offers a compression rate at par with proprietary formats like ECW or Mr SID.

Pro Tip: save your base maps in JPEG 2000 to save storage.

New Languages

Thanks to the hard work of our community, QField is now also available in Turkish and Japanese.

New packages

You say: wow that’s a lot! We say: there is more
We have upgraded our whole building infrastructure so that you can comfortably get even more QField goodness without having to uninstall your production ready QField.

Automated master builds

After each pull request is merged into our master code, a new package is created and automatically published on the playstore in a dedicated app called QField for QGIS – Unstable (Early Access). Installing this app will allow you to always have the latest build of QField for testing and giving feedback. On your device, this app is completely separated from the production-ready QField and has a distinctive black icon so that you do not confuse it.

Pull request builds

QField is an extremely active project, and as you see we develop multiple functionalities and fixes at the same time. If you’re particularly interested in one of this, our continuous integration fairy builds and publishes new packages automatically at each commit directly to the pull request you are interested in. To see what we are currently working on, have a look at the pull request overview page.

Experimental Windows builds

Last but definitely not least, we’ve set up an Azure CI infrastructure to build QField for windows. For now, we still consider this experimental but we already had some very successful testing. If you are interested in testing out QField for windows you can get it here, remember it is experimental so don’t use it in production yet and give us as much feedback as possible

What’s next?

As you can imagine we’ve had a very busy start of 2020, but even more is to come soon with the next releases of QField. We’d like to thank again all companies and individuals that actively use QField and that invest in making QField even better. If you feel QField misses something you need or would like to support the project, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us.