Announcing The Blue Alliance for Android

[g_sawchuk]

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.

[z_beeblebrox]

Originally Posted by brennonbrimhall

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.

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

[brennonbrimhall]

Originally Posted by z_beeblebrox

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

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:

%RedWin = (Red1OPR+Red2OPR+Red3OPR)/(Red1OPR+Red2OPR+Red3OPR+Blue1OPR+Blue2OPR+Blue3OPR)

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:

mu = Red1Average + Red2Average + Red3Average - Blue1Average - Blue2Average -Blue3Average

sigma = sqrt(Red1StandardDeviation^2+Red2StandardDeviation^2+Red3StandardDeviation^2+Blue1StandardDeviation^2+Blue2StandardDeviation^2+Blue3StandardDeviation^2)

%RedWin = normalcdf(0, 10^99, mu, sigma)

But we digress here.

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

[Philip Arola]

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

[brennonbrimhall]

Originally Posted by Philip Arola

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

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

[plnyyanks]

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.

[madhav]

TBA for Andriod will change my life forever.

[Jaxom]

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.

[Starke]

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

[nathanwalters]

Originally Posted by Jaxom

1. On the event stats page, is it possible to include the team's event ranking for each stat?

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.

Originally Posted by Jaxom

2. Can you include the team history page in each team's year list?

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

[Phalanx]

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.

[Citrus Dad]

Originally Posted by z_beeblebrox

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

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

Looking forward to using the app.

[Alex2614]

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.

[plnyyanks]

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.

[nathanwalters]

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.