Announcing The Blue Alliance for Android
 

After a summer of hard work, The Blue Alliance is excited to announce the release of a native Android app! We’ve created an app that allows you to view the data present on TBA natively on your phone, as well as try to improve the mobile competition experience. Check it out! https://play.google.com/store/apps/d....androidclient

Please post any feedback (bugs, feature requests, etc.) you might have in this thread or create an issue on GitHub for it. Development is a never-ending process, and we’re always trying to improve our products.

As with all of The Blue Alliance, this app as well as TBA for iOS (still in the works) are entirely open source. If you are a mobile developer and want to help out (or if you want to learn), take a look at the GitHub page and start contriubting - we’ve still got a lot of awesome ideas we want to implement before the season starts and the more people helping, the faster we get cool stuff. We’d love to have your help!

Re: Announcing The Blue Alliance for Android
 

This is awesome. Very cool. Very clean.

Re: Announcing The Blue Alliance for Android
 

This app is fantastic as of a first look. it's clean, easy to use and moving around the data feels natural. I'm really excited to see what else you guys come up with for this app.

Re: Announcing The Blue Alliance for Android
 

A couple bugs I noticed at first glance are attached. Under the awards tab for a team at an event, different teams' awards listed. A tie (match 54) highlighted as a win.

Would also be nice to be able to pin teams or events to the tops of tabs. Love the summary pages for teams at events, maybe split quals/elims record from overall record. Could even list awards there instead of as a standalone tab (could go either way on that).

Really good app, guys. Nice work.

Re: Announcing The Blue Alliance for Android
 

Man, how'd I miss those? Thanks for the heads up!
Reported and reported

Re: Announcing The Blue Alliance for Android
 

Yay, finally released!

Thanks to everyone who worked on this, especially Phil Lopreiato and Nathan Walters for taking initiative and spearheading the project. The app will only get better with time -- I can't wait for some of the things we're planning on implementing. :]

Re: Announcing The Blue Alliance for Android
 

This looks really nice, played around with it a bit this morning. Excited to see where this goes.

Thank you to everyone that put time into this. This should really help the fan experience.

Re: Announcing The Blue Alliance for Android
 

Favorite thing so far: "The Blue Alliance requires no special permissions."

I don't think I've ever seen that message during an install before!

Re: Announcing The Blue Alliance for Android
 

Looks awesome Phil! Great job to everyone that worked on it.

As an Apple nut, I can't wait for the iOS release as well!

Re: Announcing The Blue Alliance for Android
 

Excellent app. (Now I'm just waiting for corn dogs for students.)

It's very good as is, but during competition, it would be great to see predictions for matches and final rankings.

Re: Announcing The Blue Alliance for Android
 

That's difficult. Many teams have different in-house prediction algorithms. I do know of a probabilistic ranking prediction algorithm, but it's not very lightweight -- I recall it taking a couple of hours to process 15 or so matches.

Re: Announcing The Blue Alliance for Android
 

Nice app, very clean, I especially like the last 2 lines of the team event summary tab:

"2nd pick of the 3rd alliance"
and
"Eliminated in the finals"

Re: Announcing The Blue Alliance for Android
 

Re: Announcing The Blue Alliance for Android
 

Finally, I've been waiting for this for a long time!

Thanks a lot for putting together a mobile app for TBA, this is absolutely amazing!

Re: Announcing The Blue Alliance for Android
 

I played with this app last night. Fantastic job guys! My favorite feature has to be the YouTube integration.

Re: Announcing The Blue Alliance for Android
 

Wow! This is absolutely fantastic! From what I've seen and heard it's great! Looking forward to the iOS version coming out! Great work.

Re: Announcing The Blue Alliance for Android
 

Can't you, from OPR, which TBA calculates anyway, simply predict the scores of the remaining matches and use those to predict rankings?

Re: Announcing The Blue Alliance for Android
 

Prediction is tricky. It's easy to do a deterministic prediction (win/lose), but that's almost useless. How close is the win? How likely is it that that outcome will occur? What's far more valuable in most situations is a probabilistic prediction.

For a simple OPR-based probability, you could do something like this:
Basically, this says that Red has a 75% chance to win if Red has 75% of the OPR.

However, you also have to consider here that OPR -- the basis for that probability we generated -- is not very good for some games. This year was one, and 2012 comes to mind readily. Even in games where OPR is actually pretty good (like 2013), OPR should never be regarded as the 'god metric' that most people think it is. See my whitepaper for more of a numerical analysis.

A better method of prediction in games like 2013 or 2012 where scoring was more linear and separable (and where scores were approximately normally distributed) would be to calculate the average points teams were putting up and the standard deviation in those points. You could then generate a normal model for total red points, with:

But we digress here.

TL;DR: Yes, could be implemented, but OPR-based predictions are overrated.

Re: Announcing The Blue Alliance for Android
 

Any plans for Windows Phone? I may be able to contribute, depending on how my schedule pans out this year.

Re: Announcing The Blue Alliance for Android
 

There's discussion about it on the thebluealliance-developers Google Group.

Re: Announcing The Blue Alliance for Android
 

There should be a bugfix update rolling out over the next few hours. Thanks to everybody who sent us bug reports so we can constantly improve the app.

And a big thanks for all the positive feedback - I'm happy people find it pretty and/or useful (hopefully we can have both...)

Some fun stats:
- Yesterday, we had over 300 installs from 10 countries.
- The most popular device is the Galaxy S4
- Almost 75% of devices were running Android KitKat.

Re: Announcing The Blue Alliance for Android
 

TBA for Andriod will change my life forever.

Re: Announcing The Blue Alliance for Android
 

Very nice. 2 questions:
1. On the event stats page, is it possible to include the team's event ranking for each stat?
2. Can you include the team history page in each team's year list?

Thanks for providing the app. I don't know if it'll change my life forever, but it's a great alternative to using my browser.

Re: Announcing The Blue Alliance for Android
 

Thank you to The Blue Alliance for the app! I am loving it! You guys are great!

Re: Announcing The Blue Alliance for Android
 

I've filed a feature request for that! It's a pretty trivial thing to do, we can probably push out an update by the end of the week.

We're already planning for that feature in a future release.

Re: Announcing The Blue Alliance for Android
 

Nice App. I've always liked TheBlueAlliance on the web, now it's my phone.
I'll be updating it as it evolves over time as I expect it will.

One thing that would be nice would be to be able to move the app from Phone Storage to Internal Storage instead.

Re: Announcing The Blue Alliance for Android
 

There will NEVER be corn dogs for students--you wouldn't have a reason to come back and mentor! :yikes:

Looking forward to using the app.

Re: Announcing The Blue Alliance for Android
 

Very great work! Thank you for your tireless effort to make FIRST a little easier. I can't wait for the iOS app, as I will be making the leap very soon. Very cool, indeed.

Re: Announcing The Blue Alliance for Android
 

For members of the beta community, we just pushed an update to the beta channel. This includes support to view anything and everything districts (including points)! If everything goes well, we should roll it out to the regular channel in the next few days.

Re: Announcing The Blue Alliance for Android
 

Version 1.3.1 is rolling out soon via the Play Store production channel! It features district support, match times for unplayed matches (when they're available), and numerous bug fixes.

Right now we're working on implementing favorites and notifications. Favorites will let you track your favorite matches, events, teams, etc. With notifications, you'll be able to subscribe for notifications for a variety of things (score notices, alliance selection, etc.) We'll be doing some cool stuff with upcoming match notifications; based on when previous matches finished, we can determine how ahead or behind schedule the event is and notify the predicted time future matches will be starting.

All of this information will be tied to your Google account and sync between Android and web (and eventually iOS).

We can't wait to get these features out to you; we're hoping to have these things in the beta channel by Chezy Champs. We're always open to suggestions from our users; let us know if there's anything you want to see from these features.

Re: Announcing The Blue Alliance for Android
 

Is there a hangup with the API, or whatever it is that dishes out the data to the app? I can't seem to get it to update the events for 2015 to coincide with the TBA website or the FIRST site. My app is currently showing events in weeks 2-6 that the website as well as FIRST are showing should be weeks 1-5. Pressing refresh gives me a neat twirly with no change. Running 1.3.1.

Thanks!

Re: Announcing The Blue Alliance for Android
 

That's a known bug. We should be able to push a fix in the next update.

Re: Announcing The Blue Alliance for Android
 

The events should be correct, but the week numbering is off. Like Nathan said, we'll push out a fix soon.

Re: Announcing The Blue Alliance for Android
 

Sounds good. Just happened to notice when I was checking for a new Regional to see if it has posted for Volunteer access. Love the app.

Thanks!

Re: Announcing The Blue Alliance for Android
 

Thanks for the report and the nice words! Stay tuned in the next 24 hours, we're trying to push out some pretty cool stuff for Chezy Champs :)

Re: Announcing The Blue Alliance for Android
 

I just pushed v2.0 out to the beta channel - this release includes the long awaited ability to favorite and subscribe to things. You can opt to receive push notifications when match scores get posted to TBA. More types of notifications are coming soon.

Providing the roll out goes well, this will be pushed to the main channel in the next few days.

Re: Announcing The Blue Alliance for Android
 

Happy competition season - we just hit 2,000 installs!

Sorry about the lack of data today, FIRST's API was not working - all the data should appear once that gets fixed up.

In the meantime, make sure you're testing out the myTBA features, including notifications! We want to squash all its bugs as soon a possible and provide an awesome experience!

Re: Announcing The Blue Alliance for Android
 

Something minor but when I'm at the currents events tab it just stays blank and won't show anything.

Re: Announcing The Blue Alliance for Android
 

Try updating the app. Thanks!

Re: Announcing The Blue Alliance for Android
 

yeah i'm having the same issue, updating doesn't seem to do anything

edit: my tablet was derping, got it working now :D

Re: Announcing The Blue Alliance for Android
 

That's strange, the newest version shouldn't even be saying "Current Week" (this should have been fixed in #322)

Can you go into settings and see what the specific version number says? If it's anything less that 2.1.7 (see attached screenshot), there is a newer version available. Check the Play Store.

If you don't see an update in the Play Store, you can download the newest apk here: https://github.com/the-blue-alliance...droid/releases

If none of those things fix it, try clearing app data (or uninstalling and reinstalling).

EDIT: Happy you got it fixed!

Re: Announcing The Blue Alliance for Android
 

We've noticed crashes in the app for Android 4.x users. Not to worry, we're reverting back to the previous release, the update should hit your device in an hour or two. The affected version is 2.1.9 - if you're running that, please update.

A fix containing our updates for week 2 should roll out shortly thereafter. Sorry about that :(

If anybody would like to join our beta testing group to try out new features first and help us catch errors sooner please join our Google+ community and opt in to the channel. We greatly appreciate anybody who signs up to help make a better user experience for all.

Re: Announcing The Blue Alliance for Android
 

Thanks everybody for helping us hit 5,000 downloads this weekend! Hope y'all like the app, and please let us know if you have any ideas for making it even better.

Re: Announcing The Blue Alliance for Android
 

Hope everybody liked using TBA for Android during this (almost whole) season! If you're interested in some stats about the app's usage, I posted some over on Facebook.

I hope y'all are excited for champs, because we're working on having our most-requested feature ready - something you've come to know and love on the website (and something that recently got a new twist this year). Stay tuned!

Re: Announcing The Blue Alliance for Android
 

I'm x-posting this from here, because apparently Chief doesn't include the TBA subforum in the "Recent Activity" section on the portal by default.


The Blue Alliance has always been in constant evolution, driven by feedback from its users and countless hours of work from community volunteers. We've heard your suggestions loud and clear, and we are thrilled to announce that we are bringing GameDay to our Android app!

In GameDay, you can view the full list of webcasts for the current week. Although you can't (yet!) assemble an 8-video mega-view, clicking a webcast will deep-link you to the appropriate streaming app if it’s installed, or let you view it in your browser.



As few weeks ago, we added a live ticker to the web version of GameDay. We received a lot of positive feedback, so we're bringing it to Android too. With the live ticker powered by our friends at Firebase, you’ll be able to keep up to date with all the action in real time, with the ability to filter updates so you only see what you want. We currently limit the list to the 25 most recent updates, which should be more than enough to stay on top of the latest match results.





We'll be rolling out this update over the course of the next few days in time for champs, so keep an eye out for it. As always, watch out for any bugs and report them if you find them. We'll be watching Chief and Github and fixing bugs as they're reported to give everyone the best experience possible. Thanks for your continued support, and good luck at champs!