Hi all,

Hope you have been well! We have just released v4.2 of the Commons Android app to production. The update is now available on Play store [1] and F-droid [2]. You could also build the app directly from our GitHub repository [3].

An important thing we wanted to communicate. We've changed the Mapbox API key used by the app in this release (v4.2.1) due to some unforeseen circumstances. We also had to revoke the old API key that is being used by the older version of the app (< v4.2.1).

You might face issues with accessing maps in those versions of the app such as the Nearby screen appearing blank etc. We request your to kindly upgrade to v4.2.1 in order to continue using the features for which rendering a map is necessary. Other features should work fine. We regret the inconvenience that this may cause. Feel free to open an issue in our issue tracker [4] for any assistance. We'll be glad to help.

This release also includes the done by Ritika Pahwa during GSoC 2023. This includes changes done to improve the reliability of the failed, stuck uploads and changes to prevent location metadata loss for uploads done via in the app.

In case you've been facing issues with the uploads, do give the latest version a try. It should be better than before. Feel free to reach out to us with any feedback you may have. It would be very helpful.

Other significant changes:

- Dark mode colour improvements

- Uploading via the in-app camera has been fixed and should work normally.

- Provide the ability to edit an image to losslessly rotate it while uploading.

- Category search now shows exact matches without any discrepancies

- We've switched to using MapLibre instead of Mapbox and thereby disabled telemetry sent to Mapbox. We're also actively exploring alternatives to Mapbox so that we could completely move away from it. Check out the related issue [5] for information regarding the same.

- Fix some redundant crash issues

Checkout our changelog [6] for a more detailed set of changes since the last announcement.

[[ References ]]

[1]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=fr.free.nrw.commons [2]: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/fr.free.nrw.commons [3]: https://github.com/commons-app/apps-android-commons/releases/tag/v4.2.1 [4]: https://github.com/commons-app/apps-android-commons/issues [5]: https://github.com/commons-app/apps-android-commons/issues/5352 [6]: https://github.com/commons-app/apps-android-commons/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md

Best regards, Sivaraam (User:Kaartic)