Vespucci 15.1 has been available for a couple of days now from googles play store marking the third larger release (14.1, 15.0 and 15.1) this year and our traditional release for the holiday season.

Details on what has changed can be found further down, but first let me point out a few important points from the past year and things to be aware about that will be happening in 2021.

The OSMF and iD

2020 marked the OSMF becoming a participant in the OSM editor market place, you might say what does that concern me? Well, even if not all the developers are competing for funding (like iD, Rapid, StreetComplete and many others), all are competing for relevance. Or put differently: mapper market share. How exactly this will play out going forward isn’t clear yet, but it already has consequences in development, for example I’ve put all tablet related improvements on hold. The required effort just doesn’t makes sense with the OSMF expanding iDs use outside of the classic desktop on to tablets..

More https/SSL woes

A couple of weeks back Let’s Encrypt dropped a bomb. Let’s Encrypt is by far the most popular provider of free encryption keys for https use, and are widely used throughout open source and data, and the OpenStreetMap ecosystems. For example Let’s Encrypt certificates are used on all OSM infrastructure that has so fully migrated to https that use without is no longer possible.

Android 7.1 as the oldest version that will no longer work with Let’s Encyrpt is fairly young, and lots of users are “still”* using it. An estimated 33% of the 2.5 billion Android devices will be effected. So we can’t simply ignore this happening.

On the OSM operations side Tom Hughes has thankfully made some changes that will push back the deadline from January to September 2021. My intention is to have a workaround available that will work for imagery sources and similar in release 15.2 that will be available in January or as soon as we can properly test the change. What is unclear is if there is an actual longer term solution for OAuth (re-)authentication with the OSM API (this uses a system component), however it is still too early to tell.

* just the amount of e-waste that this change will potentially cause would seem to make it far too early to contemplate, however that doesn’t seem to have been a consideration.

Vespucci 15.1 Highlights

The full text can be found on our website 15.1 Release notes.

Note that the version of 15.1 currently available from F-Droid was the first Beta release of 15.1 and can’t be recommended for production use. Signed APKs can however also be found on our github repo

User interface changes and additions

Action modes that require multiple actions are now exited by touching on a floating action button with a check icon instead of via the back button. This effects the way creation mode, creating a relations members, editing a relation and the new create and add to route modes.

All these modes will now further retain state over the Android activity lifecycle.

Way creation mode

All additions are now encapsulated in one undo checkpoint, and can be completely undone by one undo operation once the way is created. The undo button visible in the mode will, as previously, remove the last added node, this will however not add extra checkpoints. Aborting the mode will currently retain the way and any created nodes.

Create relation mode / Add to relation mode

Available from the element (node, way, relation) selection and multi-select modes. Create relation now asks you to select a relation type before proceeding and Add to relation asks you to select a relation type. Elements can be added and removed. Clickable elements are filtered, when available, by preset role filters. If a role filter matches exactly the role will be set for the member.

NEW Add / remove member

Available in the Relation selected mode allows adding and removing members for the currently selected relation.

NEW Create and add to route mode

Available from the Way selected mode. These are specialized modes for building route relations and support auto-splitting of ways. They currently do not support removing route members, that needs to be done via the Relation selected mode. Aborting the modes will not create or modify the relation, however ways that have been split will remain split (as this is done in per way undo checkpoints, individual way splits can be undone if necessary).

Alternative tagging display

We’ve added a facility to display alternative tagging for an object that matches a specific preset with such information. Currently this is available via a menu entry in the property editor.

Removed Help launcher icon

Instead of a launcher icon we now provide a shortcut (long press on the icon) to directly start the help viewer (available on Android 8 and higher.

Better reporting and display of tag issues when merging and splitting ways

Issues occurring when a ways are merged or a way is split are now displayed in a dialog in detail, with the option to investigate them via the element information dialog and potentially fix them in the property editor.

Feedback form behaviour changes

As github no longer supports logins with user name / password this has been removed as an option for the feedback form. If you have a github account you can change a preference to allow issue creation via the normal github web UI. This will be used automatically if you have the github app installed, however note that while the github app catches the URL it doesn’t support documented github API for passing parameters (issue template to use and submitted information). Unluckily there is no reasonable way to submit bug reports to github to get this issue addressed.