Mobile Data Collection Android app for remote areas

Question

I am working in the land-use sector and the use of mobile data collection tools (MDCT) is almost a no-brainer. I have been working with MDCT for about 10 years now. I started with ODK, which to me, still is the 'mother' of all MDCT tools: the flexibility it offers in creating smart forms, the huge number of question types, and the robustness, it is (close to) perfect. However, ODK has one weak issue, and that is, it does not enable monitoring. With that, I mean that you cannot create a relational database for monitoring. For example, when you first visit a site (registration), we want to revisit that site every year and record the state, enabling us to do trend analysis over time. For that, we need to be able to create relational data with our MDCT.

The issue is that even after 10+ years, I haven't found an MDCT that combines the power of ODK and also does monitoring. I am disappointed each time I think I found a good MDCT: by far most of those tools are not capable of carrying out monitoring. Even the MDCT of ESRI (FieldMaps, Survey123 Connect) cannot do the job properly and requires a lot of workarounds. We also explored AKVO, which has great architecture and comes close to our 'perfect tool'. However, this software does not have the flexibility of ODK (very few question types, poor smart form creation).

Other requirements that we need are:

• Offline data collection
• Strong field mapping tool (polygons, points)
• Works on Android (most used in development countries)
• 'Dummy' proof/very easy to work with from an enumerator perspective
• Robust

Has anyone found an interesting MDCT out there that comes close to what I am looking for?

There are a lot out there and it is a huge amount of work to benchmark them all.

Answer 1

Context: I'm one of the leads of the ODK project.

I would encourage you to give the relatively new ODK concept of Entities a look (https://docs.getodk.org/entities-intro/). You can think of an Entity List as a database table. Each Entity has a unique, system-generated ID. You can do things like use that ID to relate form submissions or multiple Entities to each other like database joins. Forms can create Entities, update them, or look up their values. Every update is versioned so it can be viewed and verified.

Currently Entity creation and update require a server round trip but we are targeting late fall 2024 for fully offline Entity creation and update.