Now it’s even easier to contribute to science from your phone!

On any crowded public bus (before the pandemic), people sat next to each other, eyes fixed on their phones, smiling, swiping. 

What were they all doing? Using a dating app, maybe. Or maybe they were separating wildcam footage of empty desert from beautiful birds. Maybe they were spotting spiral arms on faraway galaxies.

Maybe one of them was you!  

We’ve loved seeing the participation in the Zooniverse through the mobile app (available for iOS and Android) over the past two years. So we made it even easier for you to do that wherever you swipe these days—a park bench, or maybe your home. (Please don’t swipe and drive). 

Right now, you can go into the app and contribute to Galaxy Zoo Mobile, Catalina Outer Solar System Survey, Disk Detective, Mapping Historic Skies, Nest Quest Go, or Planet Four: Ridges. And we have more projects on the way!

What’s new in the app

When you update to version 2.8.2, you’ll notice a slick new look. At the very top, there’s now an “All Projects” category. This will show you everything available for mobile—with the projects that need your help the most sorted at the very top! You can also still choose a specific discipline, of course.

That’s it for features that are totally new, but a lot of features in this version are fixed. No more crashing when you tap on browser projects. A lot fewer project-related crashes. Animated gifs, which previously worked only on iOS, now also work on Android—so researchers can show you an image that changes over time.  

What’s more—and you’ll never see this, but it’s important to us, the developers—we’ve made a lot of changes that help us keep improving the app. We have better crash reporting mechanisms and more complete automated testing. We also updated all of our documentation so that developers from outside our team can contribute to the app, too! We’d love to be a go-to open source project for people who are learning, or working in, React Native (the platform on which our app is built).

Aggregate Functionality

The full list of functionalities now includes:

• Swipe (binary question [A or B.] response)
• Single-answer question (A, B, or C)
• Multi-answer question (any combination of A, B, and C.)
• Rectangle drawing task (drawing a rectangle around a feature within a subject)
• Single-image subjects
• Multi-image subjects (e.g. uploading 2+ images as a single subject; users swipe up/down to display the different images)
• Animated gifs as subjects
• Subject auto-linking (automatically linking subjects retired from one workflow into another workflow of interest on the same project)
• Push notifications (sending messages/alerts about new data, new workflows, etc., via the app)
• Preview (an owner or collaborator on a project in development being able to preview a workflow in the ‘Preview’ section of the mobile app)
• Beta Review (mobile enabled workflows are accessible through the ‘Beta Review’ section of the app for a project in the Beta Review process; includes an in-app feedback form)
• Ability to see a list of all available projects, as well as filter by discipline (with active mobile app workflows listed at the top)

We also carried out a number of infrastructure improvements, including: 

• Upgrades to the React Native libraries we use
• Created a staging environment to test changes before they are implemented in full production
• Additional test coverage
• Implemented bug reporting and tracking
• Complete documentation, so open source contributors can get the app running from our public code repository
• And a myriad of additional improvements like missing icons no longer crashing the app, improvements to the rectangle drawing task, etc.

Note: we will continue developing the app; this is just the end of this phase of effort and a great time to share the results.

If you’re leading a Zooniverse project and have any questions about where in the Project Editor ‘workflow’ interface to ‘enable on mobile’, don’t hesitate to email contact@zooniverse.org. And/or if you’re a volunteer and wonder if workflow(s) on a given project could be enabled on mobile, please post in that project’s Talk to start the conversation with the research team and us. The more, the merrier!

Looking forward to having more projects on the mobile app!

A Few Stats of Interest:

• Since Jan 1, 2020: 
  • 6.2 million classifications submitted via the app (that’s 7% of 86.7 million classifications total through Zooniverse projects)
  • 18,000 installations on iOS + 17,000 on Android
• Current Active Users (people who have used the app in the last 30 days):
  • 1,800 on iOS + 7,700 on Android

Previous Blog Posts about the Zooniverse Mobile App:

• https://blog.zooniverse.org/2019/05/08/notes-on-the-zooniverse-mobile-app-new-functionality-release/ 
• https://blog.zooniverse.org/2019/08/01/notes-on-the-zooniverse-mobile-app-a-first-look-at-mobile-usage-and-results/ 
• https://blog.zooniverse.org/2018/11/05/beta-for-mobile/
• https://blog.zooniverse.org/2018/05/18/notes-on-mobile-launching-a-workflow/