Hello VictronEnergy,
I'm a big fan of your products, I use the SmartSolar, the SmartShunt, the Phoenix Inverter and the LoRaWan Module happily.
As many before, I do also have feature suggestions to improve the usability of the VictronConnect App. I strongly believe you should invest more UI development resources into the App, as todays mantra is "mobile first" when it comes to building UIs. Don't get me wrong, I like the Apps structure and easiness of use, but I believe some crucial things are still missing for a happy user experience.
Many other such posts where made before this, so I'm sorry if there are a few duplicate requests.
Some of these other posts reported a flawed bluetooth connection and thus the app constantly needs to re-connect. I must say the App is most stable and very smoothly useable with Iphones. I tried several Android Phones and even with Victrons suggested Samsung Phones, the app runs far slower and not as smooth as with an Iphone.
Anyways the troubles of us VicrtonConnect users are still always the same, no matter which phone, the pain is only amplified on Android. So here is my which list:
* general offline mode
* more history metrics
* remove trends - replace with daily metrics
* Dashboard
* background mode
Let me elaborate in detail:
general offline mode
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I think that's pretty obvious: I want to access my harvest history and all the relevant historic statistics, even when I'm not connected via bluetooth. I'd also like to see how "old" the history data is, so to speak, when was the last update.
Currently the "Status" tab is the Entry tab when connecting to the device. I would change this to the history tab and grey out the Status tab. When clicking on the status tab, the app could try to reconnect via bluetooth while still showing the history data.
I would consider this to be very important, with only little difficulty.
more history metrics
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Some other posts mentioned some missing metrics, here is my wish list:
I'd like to see the current temperature (in Status) and also the historic values (Minimum, Maximum, Average).
I'd like to see daily average values for the solar power and the battery voltage.
I'd like to see the minimum, average and maximum power on the load port (on MPPT with Load connectors).
I consider this medium important, with only little difficulty. Not sure if the MPPT firmware would need updates to calculate the averages and send the temperature information.
remove trends - replace with daily metrics
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I'd really like to see a solar, battery, and power output curve for the last and current day. more or less similar to the ones from the VRM but with a slightly higher resolution (e.g. every 15 minutes).
The trends functionality is rather useless, as many suggested before, as it requires the app to run constantly in foreground. I would completely remove this function.
I consider this to be medium important and medium difficult. This would surely require firmware upgrades and changes to the app.
Dashboard
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When using multiple Smart Victron Products It would be fantastic to have a status dashboard which includes the most important stats into a single page. I'd like to see the current Solar Yield, DC Load Power, AC Load Power, Batter Fill level for my setup. I can imagine other metrics could be interesting in such a dashboard too.
I consider this to be less important and rather difficult as it might require multiple parallel bluetooth connections, which might be different on each platform.
background mode
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This has been requested often, and I would request it once more. I'd like to have a background mode which leaves the bluetooth connection open even when the app is in background, so that the app doesn't need to reconnect and load all values again when switching to it.
I consider this to be medium important and difficult as it might be different on different platforms.
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I understand it is a lot work to improve the app, build the firmware test everything and finally release it for multiple platforms. Some of these features might be very difficult or even impossible to add. But keep the mantra "mobile first" in mind.
I always recommend your products to friends and colleagues. It would be much easier if I could show them my real offline data with my mobile. I know there's the demo function, but still I'd like to share my stats with them, so they can learn how much energy they can harvest with a similar setup like mine.
