Arena Mobile Freezing/Lagging During Field Surveys with Conditional Fields

[werzum]

We are experiencing performance issues with Arena Mobile during field surveys conducted by a reforestation organization in Panama. Specifically, the app lags and eventually freezes after entering multiple records (10+), forcing surveyors to revert to Excel for data collection (which we obviously wanted to move away from in the first place). The issue was observed on an Honor device (unknown series) and a Samsung Galaxy S24 and only occurred in areas with poor network coverage. The problem persists even if using flight mode, suggesting it is not directly linked to the device attempting network uploads.

The survey in question includes 5–10 conditional fields per record, which we suspect could contribute to the problem by consuming significant device resources. Testing with a simplified version of the survey, which removed several conditionals, showed a noticeable improvement. Using this streamlined survey, we successfully entered 20 records without lag on a Samsung Galaxy S21. In contrast, entering 20 records with the original, more complex survey caused lag on the same device. This seems to confirm that the complexity or quantity of conditional fields plays a role in the issue.

We are seeking pointers on which types of conditionals or configurations are the most resource-intensive and should be avoided to optimize performance. Additionally, we would appreciate guidance on further debugging steps and possible fixes, as ensuring the app’s reliability is critical for the adoption of Arena Mobile. The next survey is approaching, so some quick pointers would be immensely helpful. Thank you for your support and the great work on Arena!

[SteRiccio]

Dear user,
Many thanks for having reported this issue.
We will need to contact you to your private email address to get some more details about your survey and solve together this issue. Next time please contact us in our support forum because it will be easier for us to contact you on your private email address, without the need for you to write it in the forum or here.
These performance issues could be related to the way the expressions (in default values, validation rules, etc.) are defined, so it would be good to go together through all of them and see what it could cause the problem.
Meanwhile, please double check that you are using the latest version of the mobile app (1.0.71 build 228).
Many thanks,
Open Foris Team

[werzum]

Thank you for the quick response - we got in touch with the team and identified some likely culprits (repeated creation of the same variable, which also included a lookup to a larger table, which is now defined once and then used in the entire record) as well as using the experimental jump-between-fields option.
Tests with Arena Mobile Experiments showed nearly no lag when entering data, but since the jump-between-fields option is not available and the lack of Spanish translation, we can not use it in our specific case.
We are still trying to figure out why this issue only seems to occur in areas with bad reception or in flight mode.