For those who don’t know me, I’ve been working closely with Yaw and
the other fantastic developers on ODK improvements. I hope you’ve been
enjoying the monthly releases! If you’re a developer, do come play
with us at http://github.com/opendatakit/
We’ll be making bigger improvements over the next few months and want
to make sure we have processes in place to get community feedback. As
a first step, we are launching a beta program for ODK Collect.
Beta members will receive updates before they are rolled out to
everyone. Each beta release will provide a list of changes so that you
can quickly identify affected forms and verify that they work as
expected on your device. We do our best to catch unexpected behavior
but we don’t have access to every combination of form, device, and
Android version.
Final releases are planned for the last Sunday of the month and we
will publish a beta on the Wednesday before that. We may put out
earlier betas when we make big changes and would like more feedback.
We really appreciate your help making ODK Collect as good as it can be!
Will this install a new instance of ODK Collect or will it update an
existing one? I would be happy to help test but at the same time would want
to be able to roll back if there was an issue.
Yes, you should be able to roll back to the release version if you
leave the beta. The caveat here is that betas could have unexpected
behavior, so try it on a device that doesn't have real campaign data.
To leave the beta, find the ODK Collect app detail page in the Google
Play Store. Find the section on testing and tap leave. Uninstall the
Collect beta, then reinstall the Collect release.
If you find that you can't easily roll back to the release version,
please do let us know. We are new to the beta process as well and are
learning as we go.
Thanks,
Yaw
···
On Tue, May 16, 2017 at 3:05 AM, Richard Fletcher wrote:
> Will this install a new instance of ODK Collect or will it update an
> existing one? I would be happy to help test but at the same time would want
> to be able to roll back if there was an issue.
>
> --
> --
> Post: opendatakit@googlegroups.com
> Unsubscribe: opendatakit+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com
> Options: http://groups.google.com/group/opendatakit?hl=en
>
> ---
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
> "ODK Community" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an
> email to opendatakit+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Related question: Is it possible to get beta releases to download/install directly via APK file -- without using Google Play Store and/or a Google Account?
Right now there is barely demand (think 15 people) for the Play Store beta, so I think the demand for non Play Store is probably zero. I think the priority for the next few months is to grow the beta on Play Store accounts where we can more easily get stack traces, respond to user comments, etc.
Is there a problem you think a beta APK would solve?
The only scenario I can foresee is if someone is either unwilling or unable to get/use a Google Account. (Possibly due to residence or other issues.) That said, if no one has expressed concerns yet, I wouldn't worry. But if someone does have some concerns that haven't discussed yet, hopefully they will one day search/find this topic and chime in.
I am so grateful to the members of the developers' community for their effort to make this happen. It is going to make a big difference to the intervention of using ODK for self-reporting of daily medication.