Collector for Android - SD Card Support for .tpk

[KirkDavis1]

Hello all,

I have researched into this topic, but have not found an updated answer.  Has ESRI Collector for Android decided to support tile package (.tpk) storage on SD cards?  I understand that there were performance issues with SD cards during testing.  I would like to know if anyone has experimented with this or if Collector plans on including this feature in future iterations?  I need to make a disclaimer that I have not tested saving .tpk files in an SD card - I wanted to check here first.

Thanks,

Kirk

[PeteCrosier]

Thanks, guess I'll carve out some time on Monday to have a go at this!

[SIGSERPE84]

We have followed each steps and it didn't work on our Samsung Galaxy Tab 4.

The format of our SD card is FAT32.

Did Adam's solution work for anyone else ?

[AnastasiaNaymushina]

I suppose the version of Android on your device was under 4.4.

https://community.esri.com/thread/127792#comment-662114

That is why it worked.

[AdamOlson]

I am thinking that devices may need to be rooted to work.  Because the devices it works on for me ARE rooted and the devices that it does not work are NOT rooted.

I will root a device its not working on and report back.

[DougBrowning]

We are using a Android app by a vendor that uses TPK files on a SD card allowing us to take very large areas offline (3 million+ acres down to L16).  We have no performance issues at all running 30+GB of caches/TPKs - 12+ unzipped caches and 80+ TPK files.  Some tpks are 600+MB and still no issue.   We also can put any shp files we want on. 

We do unzip that larger TPKs for the imagery (3+gb) since it can get slow but other than that it is as fast as we can pan on Tab 4 and newer.  I ran a high res test last week and was running a 16GB imagery cache no problem.  We have had it running for over 2 years on tablets as old as Samsung Tab 2s.  We go buy the faster SD cards.

I did a lot of performance testing on internal and SDcards for our app.  I found the speed to be the same on a SD card if not faster (maybe because the app is local splitting the load).  So I am always very surprised when I hear Esri say this.  It has been our main reason for not using collector. 

I wish they would open it up and let us at least try it.

[Natalie_MRunyan1]

Does anyone know if this limitation still exists? I'm not finding it in the list of current features, and I find lots of talk about offline basemaps but nothing about using on external SD.

[Kylie]

SD cards are supported in devices running a version of Android earlier than 4.4. See FAQs—Collector for ArcGIS | ArcGIS 

Update: With the 17.0.1 release in June 2017, using an SD card is supported on all verisons of Android.

[Natalie_MRunyan1]

woohoo!  But, wait, EARLIER than 4.4, so this is a feature that will not be supported going forward?!  My phone is >2 years old and I'm on Android 6.0... are there even any devices still using Android < 4.4

[Kylie]

It is on the roadmap to add it to later versions as well.

[DougBrowning]

Can you please make sure we can set the specific directory as well.  Not forced to a directory named Collector or anything like that.  This is so I can point both my apps to the same location.  I do this for Survey123 now and it works great.  (BTW Survey123 has let me pick any dir for tpks for some time now - look at how they did it.)

All our tablets are Android 6 now so I guess we have to wait.  For our app we had to program in a way to pick the actual dir to use since in v6 the card is named by the serial number.  So for example /storage/3876-5345/dir/tpks  There is no way to know the card name in advance.  But in the end it was nice to have it so flexible.  Please just give us a dir pick box to set the location.

Also please make sure it can read ALL tpks in the spot even if they are buried in subdirs.  That way I can organize them better and use my current app structure.

One last idea.  Allow the tpks to be unzipped as well.  We have found that this really speeds up larger caches - like for imagery.  As listed in my previous post I have over 100 tpks on my tablets now - some up to 9 GB.  Have been using them for 3 years now and learned a lot about them.  SD Card has always worked great.  I have noticed that SD Cards rated at 80 MB/S or higher work the best in newer tablets.

As far as the TPKs themselves I still have 5 open bugs on the building tools (Create Map package, Export tile cache, etc) that have been open for 2 years now - even after being escalated.  Getting these to work right is critical. 

Thanks a lot!