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Positioning accuracy update for IndoorAtlas SDK

By Osma Ahvenlampi, SVP Engineering

As you might gather from the small point version increment, this is a bug-fix release. A couple of relatively minor things on the mobile SDK, and a major improvement on the cloud side. You’re already using the latter improvement without needing to update the SDK! That’s how we roll, thanks to the cloud. You’re welcome!

The nitty-gritty: we heard from a couple of our valued customers that they were experiencing unexplained variation in positioning accuracy in field tests. So we took a deep dive with them and have been submerged in devices, venues, phone cases, wallets, bags, keychains and magnets for a while.

Turns out the automatic background calibration we introduced in April with SDK 1.4 sometimes trusted its earlier calibration results a bit too long, while a phone might have been re-biased by metal objects near to it. We found a way to overcome this with a small protocol tweak, and now a lot of phones re-calibrate much faster. A well-calibrated phone means a faster, more accurate position fix.

This change was deployed in our cloud services on 2015-07-13 and your application is already benefiting of it. You should update the SDK anyway – there are no API changes and the bug fixes, while small, do improve performance.

You can download the SDKs on developer.indooratlas.com immediately. This SDK matches functionality with that in our venue mapping tools on both iTunes App Storeand Google Play.

If you have faced some issues before this, please give it another go. We’d be more than happy to get some feedback if this helped in your case or if you’re still seeing some problems. Please contact us at and let’s see together what could be the issue.

Release notes for IndoorAtlas SDK v 1.4.2

2015-07-13

All platforms

Several cloud-side improvements to calibration routines improve positioning accuracy, automatically available also for the April 1.4 SDK release.

Android

Reduced logging level for the production build, which should bring a small performance improvement to applications.

Fix to turn background wifi scanning back on after a use of the phone as a Wifi hotspot stops it on the platform level.

iOS

Fixed device model information parsing.

Fixed authentication issues with devices that have clock out of sync.

TLS Connectivity fixes.