This year was another successful year for Mergin Maps, as we are growing from a small scale QGIS field data collection startup to a feature-rich and scalable enterprise geodata collection solution.
In 2023, we achieved several major milestones:
- Our platform is truly global with active users on all continents
- Vibrant open-source community with over 1000 people on our Slack channel
- Significant growth within our internal team, with increased focus on customer support, feature development and marketing
- Attended all of the biggest GIS industry events in Europe - GeoBusiness in London, InterGEO in Berlin and FOSS4G in Kosovo
Now, let's take a look at what are the biggest product improvements.
What happened in our product in 2023?
Introducing workspaces - we started the year by creating workspaces. The goal of workspaces was to simplify user experience, invitations management for new team members and improved collaboration. The structure of the dashboard within workspaces is more intuitive and easier to understand.
- Position tracking - the most wanted feature is finally in the app. You can track routes of your surveyors and evaluate it back in QGIS to retrace their steps in time. It works in the background, even with the screen locked on your mobile phone.
- Brand design evolution - as we started the year with the goal of improving our website and user interfaces, we didn't fully realize how much impact it would have. Finishing the year with the new website and re-designed apps (coming soon), we hope you will appreciate the design clarity and improved user experience.
- Improving speed and stability - as the technical debt rolled over, we addressed these performance issues in our “October bug fixing challenge” resulting in deep optimisation of key speed and stability issues and improving the robustness of the synchronisation process.
- Ability to customise your photo names.
- Improvement to workflows between PostGIS databases and Mergin Maps.
- Ability to download vector tiles in QGIS to be used in the app as offline background maps.
What are the plans for 2024
As it often goes in software development, we are always looking for ways to improve our user experience. We are planning to develop several new features, such as:
- User interface improvements - as a direct result of the rebranding, we are changing the user interface in the mobile app and dashboard (web app). Our field survey app will be better, more intuitive and with a much improved user experience.
- Maps publishing - an interesting feature on the top of the list for 2024 is publishing simplified online maps. Webmaps are planned to be embedded into our dashboard and with a simple click, you can publish it for your team or external clients and customers. With this feature, sharing collected data will be simple and effective for every organisation.
Remember, you can always change our plans and raise your ideas in our wishlist. We are monitoring it often, meaning more votes for any feature will make it a higher priority for development.
Finally, we want to thank you, our amazing community of users, for your continuous support throughout the year, whether you were reporting problems, translating our application or presenting our app on different occasions. With the strong support of our community, we are happy to work hard and bring you the best possible product in 2024.
Happy new year, surveyors!