Testing the Soundscape app

The Android and iOS apps are now built from a single shared codebase, so the UI and behaviour described here apply to both unless a section specifically calls out a difference between them.

Reporting problems: if you’re an STA member you can ping us on Slack. Otherwise please send all feedback to the Help Desk at soundscapeAndroid@scottishtecharmy.support.

Requirements

We don’t know of any other requirements, but that’s one of the things this testing should help us understand.

Installing the app

Android

The released version of the app is freely available on the Play Store, and installs like any other app.

Most of what we need tested, though, is in the beta releases, which come out much more often than the full releases. The beta is a closed one, so you can’t simply opt in from the Play Store - we have to register your email address before Google will offer you the beta builds at all:

  1. Send us the Google account email address you use on the phone you’ll be testing with. STA members can do this on Slack; otherwise email the Help Desk at soundscapeAndroid@scottishtecharmy.support. It has to be the account that’s signed in to the Play Store on that phone - if you send us a different address, the beta won’t appear.
  2. We’ll add you to the tester list and send you an opt-in link back.
  3. Follow that link, signed in as the same account, and accept the invitation to become a tester.
  4. Install or update Soundscape from the Play Store as normal. There can be a delay of a few minutes to a few hours between accepting the invitation and the beta actually being offered to you, so if you still see the released version, leave it a while and check again.

After that, beta updates arrive through the Play Store like any other app update. If you want to stop testing later, just let us know and we’ll take you off the list.

iOS

The rewritten app is currently only available via TestFlight, by invitation. If you’re an STA member, ask on Slack for an invite; otherwise request one via the Help Desk at soundscapeAndroid@scottishtecharmy.support. Once you have an invitation, install TestFlight from the App Store first, then follow the invitation link to install the beta build.

If you’re updating from the older, Microsoft-authored iOS app rather than installing fresh, see Upgrading from the legacy Soundscape iOS app for what’s carried over automatically and what has changed.

Running the app the first time

The first time you run Soundscape you’ll see a series of onboarding screens which let you choose some initial settings.

The base language is US English, and all translations are made from it. If a string hasn’t been translated yet it appears in English instead - we already know about those, so there’s no need to report them. Any other language problem is of interest, though: text that’s hard to understand, or where the ordering of the phrases has come out wrong.

Things we’re interested in on the initial screens:

  • Is there any text you’re unable to read, or where words are split across lines?
  • Do you hear only silence when you tap the Listen button on the Hear Your Surroundings screen?
  • Do you hear only silence when trying the different beacon sounds on the Choose an Audio Beacon screen?

Please report any of these via the Help Desk.

Main app operation

Once you’re past the onboarding screens you shouldn’t see them again, and you should be on the main screen:

Screenshot of the Soundscape home screen

Soundscape keeps running in the background from this point on. When you want to close it for good you can exit from the main menu, or swipe the app closed - exactly how you do that depends on your phone.

Soundscape is designed to be used with headphones.

These things should all happen on the Home screen, and we’re interested if any of them don’t:

  • The map shows your current location with a red triangle. (There should be a map!)
  • The red triangle rotates as you point the phone in different directions.
  • You hear speech describing your surroundings when you tap each of the four buttons at the bottom of the screen.

If you’ve got this far and it all seems to be working, you can move on to the more detailed tests below.

Test 1 - Go for a walk

As you move around, Soundscape should periodically describe your location and call out points of interest that you pass - shops, bus stops and so on. We’re interested in anything that doesn’t sound right.

The app uses a little mobile data as it downloads maps along the way, but not much: roughly 50kb for a 600m square of map. Tiles are cached, so they’re generally only downloaded once. If you’d rather not use mobile data at all, or you want to test with no network connection, see Test 4.

Test 2 - Create a route and play it back

This uses a bit more of the UI, but once it’s set up it should be fairly straightforward.

Create some markers

Markers are points on the map which can be combined into a route. They’re saved from the Location Details screen, and there are several ways to get there:

  • Long tap the map on the Home screen, or the map on the Current Location screen.
  • Tap Current Location on the Home screen. That map scrolls and zooms, so you can save a marker, move to a new point, long tap and save another.
  • Tap Places Nearby on the Home screen and pick one of the nearby points.
  • Search, and tap one of the results.

Saved markers appear under the Markers and Routes button on the Home screen. Once you have a few, you can make a route from them.

Create a route

  1. On the Markers and Routes screen, select the Routes tab and tap the + icon in the top right.
  2. Type a name for your route, and a description if you want one.
  3. Tap Add Waypoints and add the markers you’ve created, selecting them in the order you want them to appear in the route. Tap Done.
  4. Tap Done again to save the route.

Your route should now be listed. Tap it to check it looks the way you expect.

Play the route

Tap Start Route on the Route Details screen. An audio beacon starts playing at the first waypoint, and sounds from the direction of that waypoint relative to where you are.

  • With the app open and your phone unlocked, the direction used is the way the phone is pointing.
  • Lock the phone and put it in your bag, and it switches to the direction you’re walking in.
  • The beacon sounds different depending on whether you’re walking towards it or away from it.
  • If you stop moving with the phone locked, the beacon gets quieter to indicate that there’s no direction data available.

Test 3 - Travelling by car, bus or train

Soundscape behaves differently when you’re moving at speed, and this part of the app is newer and less well tested than the walking behaviour, so we’re particularly keen for feedback on it. You should be travelling as a passenger - please don’t test this while driving.

There’s nothing to turn on. The app switches into travelling mode by itself whenever you’re moving faster than about 10mph, and switches back once you slow down or get out and walk. Ordinary pedestrian callouts (nearby shops, road crossings and so on) are deliberately suppressed while you’re travelling, because at speed there are far too many of them to be useful, and the range at which things are called out is stretched a long way so that you hear about them before you’ve already gone past.

Go for a journey of at least fifteen minutes or so - a bus route or train trip you know well is ideal, because you’ll be able to tell whether what you hear matches reality. Things you should hear along the way:

  • Where you are, every so often, e.g. “Travelling north along M8” or “Travelling east along A81 (Glasgow Road) close to Milngavie”. Numbered roads should be announced by number, and shouldn’t be re-announced every time the street name changes along the same road.
  • Settlements you’re heading towards with a distance, and the ones you’re moving away from or simply passing near.
  • Motorway junctions and exits as you reach them.
  • Large landmarks as you pass them - parks, hospitals, stadiums, shopping centres.
  • Bus, tram and train stops as you pass them. On a two-way street you should only hear about stops on your side of the road, not the ones serving the opposite direction.
  • Rivers, canals and railways you cross, e.g. “Passing over the River Clyde”.
  • Tunnels, e.g. “Entering a tunnel” - which is mainly there to explain why things are about to go quiet, since GPS is lost inside.

Note that unlike most Soundscape callouts, the periodic “where you are” announcement isn’t positioned in 3D - it’s spoken from straight ahead, because it isn’t describing something at a particular place around you.

On a train it’s a little different. The app matches you against the railway network rather than the road network, so what you hear is the settlements you pass and how far you’ve come since the last station, e.g. “On train and close to Partick, 1.6 km since Westerton”. Railway lines are just called “train” for now rather than being named - the line names aren’t in our map data yet, so there’s no need to report that. Trains also don’t get compass directions, road junctions or landmark callouts.

The thing to watch for on this one is being told you’re on a train when you’re actually in a car or bus. Motorways and railway lines are often built alongside each other for miles at a time, and telling the two apart is genuinely hard, so we’d very much like to hear about it if that happens.

Things we’re interested in:

  • Callouts for roads, stations or places that are simply wrong, or in the wrong order.
  • Being told about the same thing over and over, or long silent stretches where you passed things worth mentioning.
  • Anything announced too late to be useful.
  • Being told you’re on a train when you’re in a car or bus, or the other way round.

This test benefits enormously from a location recording - see Providing a debug location trace below. If you can turn that on before you set off and share the trace afterwards, we can replay the whole journey and see exactly what the app was thinking.

Test 4 - Offline maps

Soundscape can download map data for a region so that it keeps working - map, callouts and Places Nearby included - with no Internet connection at all. See Offline map extracts for the kinds of extracts available (country, region and city).

  1. Open the menu (the hamburger in the top left) and tap Offline maps.
  2. You should see any extracts covering your current location listed. Pick one and tap Download offline map. The first time anyone downloads a particular extract there can be a short delay while the server prepares it; after that it should start straight away. A whole country takes longer and uses more storage than a city, so pick whichever is convenient for testing.
  3. You can also find nearby extracts from any Location Details screen - look for the Nearby offline maps button.
  4. Once a download finishes, turn on Airplane Mode (or otherwise disable WiFi and mobile data) and repeat Tests 1, 2 and 3 above. The map should still draw, and callouts and Places Nearby should still work from the downloaded data.
  5. Settings has a Search mode option (Auto/Online/Offline). With no network, search should fall back to offline data by itself in Auto; you can also force it to Offline to test that path while you still have a connection.
  6. Downloaded maps can be removed again from the Offline maps screen - tap a downloaded map and choose Delete offline map. Worth checking too, especially if you’re short on storage.

We’re interested in anything that doesn’t work the same offline as it does online, how long downloads take, and whether the list of available extracts makes sense for your area.

Providing a debug location trace

The app can keep up to an hour of recorded location data while it’s running. The feature is off by default, and even when it’s on the data stays on your phone unless you choose to share it.

  1. Open the menu (the hamburger in the top left), tap Settings, scroll to the bottom and turn on Enable recording of travel.
  2. With that enabled, a new Share recording of travel option appears in the menu drawer below About Soundscape. Tap it to send us the GPX track by email or anything else in the standard Android share menu or iOS share sheet.

The file holds the location data recorded by your phone for up to the last hour the app has been running. Don’t share it if you’d rather we didn’t know where you’ve been. There’s no identifying data in it, though obviously we’ll know who sent it.

It’s genuinely useful to us: we can load a GPX file into our test code, regenerate the callouts you would have heard, see which road or path the app thought you were on, and work out why a callout came out wrong or didn’t happen at all. Enabling it is entirely optional.

Final notes

There are other features in the app, but the focus for this testing is the ones above. If anything in these instructions is unclear, let us know. Once we have some feedback there’ll be bugs to fix, and then we’ll do incremental releases. If you’re interested in helping out further on the project, take a look at the STA volunteer app for some available roles.

Thanks for reading!

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