Hi everyone,
I'm happy to announce that I've published v2.4.3 to the beta channel. I'm planning to keep this update in beta mode for a couple of weeks while observing stability and tuning the performance; later, I'll make it public. To become a beta tester, you need to enroll in Play Market on the app's page.
v2.4.3 is quite a minor update in terms of features, but quite a big update in terms of the underlying technology. Due to this, please expect some issues that may be happening from time to time, especially with aircraft alerts.
I created quite a nice instant data distribution server left for the SEAL project, and I decided to re-use it for aircraft alerts. This allows pushing aircraft alerts to devices in real-time, and significantly reduces data usage.
Here are the key benefits of the new server:
All those benefits come at a cost, and the cost is the increased load on my server. Synthetic tests show that it should be able to handle ~1000 simultaneous connections before showing degradation. However, I can only get exact numbers by rolling the service out and watch how it works in real-world scenarios.
Another important update is that starting from this version the minimum supported Android version is Android 5.0. More details in https://www.rdforum.org/threads/104786/.
Besides the new aircraft server, there are a couple more improvements:
This is a beta release, so please expect some bugs or issues may happen. Please report them here or using the bug report feature (triple tap on the speed or "Submit bug report" using the voice control).
Have fun! And special thanks to those 138 people switched to the beta update channel!
I'm happy to announce that I've published v2.4.3 to the beta channel. I'm planning to keep this update in beta mode for a couple of weeks while observing stability and tuning the performance; later, I'll make it public. To become a beta tester, you need to enroll in Play Market on the app's page.
v2.4.3 is quite a minor update in terms of features, but quite a big update in terms of the underlying technology. Due to this, please expect some issues that may be happening from time to time, especially with aircraft alerts.
I created quite a nice instant data distribution server left for the SEAL project, and I decided to re-use it for aircraft alerts. This allows pushing aircraft alerts to devices in real-time, and significantly reduces data usage.
Here are the key benefits of the new server:
- It delivers data instantly (the previous server had 10-40 seconds delay).
- It doesn't require you to specify a secondary server anymore, as everything is built-in.
- It uses less data as it sends only the updates, not the entire bundles every several seconds. Also, the secondary server isn't queried by the mobile device anymore.
- It survives failures of underlying data providers better (in the previous version, aircraft could disappear from the map in case of data provider failure).
- It provides better privacy. Instead of sending the exact driver's position to my server and then data-sources, it queries data for one of 262144 predefined sectors of the world map; no exact location is transmitted.
- It has better aircraft un-censoring based on data feeds matching (about 80% are successfully un-censored).
All those benefits come at a cost, and the cost is the increased load on my server. Synthetic tests show that it should be able to handle ~1000 simultaneous connections before showing degradation. However, I can only get exact numbers by rolling the service out and watch how it works in real-world scenarios.
Another important update is that starting from this version the minimum supported Android version is Android 5.0. More details in https://www.rdforum.org/threads/104786/.
Besides the new aircraft server, there are a couple more improvements:
- Added a map lock button. If it is pressed, the map won't reset its state to tracking the current position.
- Added altitude indicator for aircraft map labels
- Added a splash screen while the app is loading
- Improved profile names buttons display
This is a beta release, so please expect some bugs or issues may happen. Please report them here or using the bug report feature (triple tap on the speed or "Submit bug report" using the voice control).
Have fun! And special thanks to those 138 people switched to the beta update channel!