How do battery, storage and upload hold up on a long day?
Roonly records small speech-quality files, warns you when storage drops below 500 MB, and keeps uploads in a retrying queue so a long shift finishes cleanly.
A field day can mean eight hours of recording on a phone that is also running maps and messages. This article explains what Roonly does with battery, storage and connectivity, and what you can do to keep a shift from ending early.
Battery
Recording itself is light work for the phone. The bigger draws during a shift are the screen and GPS. Roonly tracks your location for the length of a shift so it can place each conversation on a map, and it uses the phone's higher-accuracy mode to do that. On iPhone the trail continues while the app is in the background; on Android it only runs while Roonly is on screen.
Practical steps:
- Start the day charged and carry a battery pack for shifts longer than 6 hours.
- Lock the screen between doors instead of leaving Roonly open.
- Do not enable Low Power Mode on iPhone during a shift; it can throttle background work.
Roonly does not monitor your battery level or stop a shift when it is low. If the phone dies, the chunks saved so far are still on disk and upload when you reopen the app and tap End Shift.
Storage
Audio is saved as compressed mono speech. An hour of recording takes roughly 30 MB, so even a 10-hour shift fits on any phone with a few hundred megabytes free.
Roonly checks free space when a shift starts and every 5 minutes after that. If free space falls below 500 MB you see a Low Storage alert once per shift, warning that recording may stop if storage runs out. Free up space before your next shift.
Local files do not pile up. Each shift chunk and each single recording is deleted from the phone once its upload succeeds. Segments recorded on the Apple Watch are deleted from the Watch as they transfer and from the phone once the recording is assembled and uploaded.
Upload
Uploads run from a queue saved on the phone. The queue survives closing the app and a phone restart. When the app is open, Roonly re-checks the queue every 30 seconds.
- Each item is tried up to 5 times, with waits of 30 seconds, 2 minutes, 10 minutes and 60 minutes between attempts.
- Shift metadata uploads before audio chunks, and older chunks before newer ones.
- Files larger than 20 MB, which usually means a long pocketed stretch during a shift, are streamed from disk with a longer timeout.
- Before retrying, Roonly refreshes your sign-in so an expired session does not block the upload.
On the Home tab you see "Uploading shift, N of M" or "Uploading conversation" while items move, and "Shift uploaded successfully" or "Conversation uploaded" when the queue is empty. If an item has used all 5 attempts, a red banner reads "Upload issue, Tap to retry". Tap it whenever you have signal.
There is no Wi-Fi-only or charging-only option. Uploads use cellular data as soon as it is available. A day of recording is a modest amount of data, comparable to streaming a couple of hours of music.
Working offline
Recording never needs a connection. The one exception is starting a shift, which creates a record on the server first; do that where you have signal. After that you can spend the whole day in a dead zone. Everything uploads when the phone reconnects, and the conversations are scored once the upload completes.
Single recordings check for a connection before each upload pass and simply wait if there is none. You will not see an offline indicator; the Uploading banner just stays until the phone finds a network.
Ending the day
When you tap End Shift, the app saves the final chunk and queues everything left. Give the phone a few minutes on a good connection before putting it away. If you must leave right away, the queue picks up the next time you open Roonly.
Related
- Shift mode: record a whole shift
- How recording works in the field
- Recording sounds wrong or will not upload
Still stuck? Contact support.