Updates to Map Data

To ensure the best possible user experience, OuterSpatial Mobile caches map data aggressively on the user's device. If a user zooms into an area on the map, the map data for that area is downloaded, cached, and, for a period of time, used for subsequent map views of the area. The amount of time a map area is cached depends on a number of factors including how much space is available on the device, the quality of the network connection, and how often the user interacts with maps in the app.

Aggressively caching map data improves performance for OuterSpatial Mobile users — especially when on a bad network connection, but it also means that changes made to map data in Manager (e.g. changing the symbol of a Point of Interest or the name of an Area) may take a little while to appear in OuterSpatial Mobile. This is by design and not an indicator that data updates aren't working properly.

If you make a change in Manager and can't see it in OuterSpatial Mobile's maps, follow these steps:

1. Wait a little while and try again. Updates to geospatial data made in Manager process every hour, on the hour, so  some changes can take up to an hour to propagate from OuterSpatial's database out to the maps in OuterSpatial Mobile.
2. If you've waited for at least 30 minutes and still can't see the changes, delete the app and re-install it. This wipes the on-device map cache completely.

In the end, aggressively caching map data improves OuterSpatial Mobile's user experience significantly and we think it's worth the tradeoff of having some changes not show up in OuterSpatial Mobile immediately. That said, we are investigating ways to "turnaround" map updates more quickly, and will likely be rolling out improvements to our processing pipeline for geospatial data in the future.