iFly GPS Forum

As mentioned just a couple of replies above, this feature is coming soon. It's being tested by the Beta test team and will be released to production users soon.

From your comment, it's worth remembering for a moment how all these magical devices work, though. Google has a ginormous infrastructure component comprising dozens of datacenters around the world ("the cloud") that provide your sync capabilities (and everything else Google provides) across all your devices. Other "cloud-based" services have similar infrastructures.

iFly doesn't benefit from all of Google's infrastructure, nor are they likely to ever set up their own datacenters to maintain their own "cloud". Instead, iFly will rely on all the devices to be synced to be co-located on the same wifi network, so they can directly talk to each other. As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, that local wifi could be hosted by an ADSB device in the cockpit, or perhaps in the future by a modern panel-mounted GPS unit, or perhaps by one of your devices configured to be a wifi hotspot with your others all logged in to that hotspot.

In practice, that should meet all of your needs, since any device that's not on your local wifi is probably not physically located with you, and so it's irrelevant whether it receives your updates to the flight plan.

But if you did want remote devices synced as well, you're out of luck, as even Google can't guarantee connectivity with remote devices while you are in flight. Since access to "the cloud" requires some link to the Internet, and cell phone data connectivity from a cruising plane (besides being illegal) is erratic at best, there is no guarantee any remote devices would stay synced properly even if they had all of Google's infrastructure to support it.

Understanding how our magic devices actually perform their magic can help us understand just what's possible and what's not...as well as where to start looking for help when the magic stops working.

Hi Cobra,

Thank you for the reply. I have read the other posts and concluded that more needed to be said. I may have lead you down the wrong path when I used Google as an example. As a design engineer for a large cell phone manufacturer, I understand how they work and the points you have made. I use many free apps for aviation that sync between my devices. This is possible and an expectation of today's users. I would like to see iFly work this easily without the limitation of being on the same WiFi network. I think spending development time on a lesser solution is wasted time. Making changes on one device and seeing them on the other device without any interaction from the user is the expectation. Telling the user that they need to set up a hot spot or buy an ADSB device or anything along these lines is simply the wrong direction to take. Delighting the customer with simplicity is a much better approach.

jshealy, what would be your preferred technical solution? "Delighting the customer with simplicity" is a great design goal, but design is constrained by available technology. How, technically, do you envision your proposed system working? What radio linkage would you suggest as a better idea than what AP is building into iFly?

Personally, I only see one radio link that's common across all devices that iFly supports: Wifi. There are two ways to set up wifi connections: Ad hoc, and infrastructure. iFly has dealt with the issues associated with "ad hoc"-type wifi connections in the past. There's a reason nobody uses ad hoc wifi anymore: It doesn't work very well. Besides that (or perhaps because of it), Android devices don't support ad-hoc connections, so that's not really even an available option.

"Infrastructure" wifi connection are the ones that typical users are very familiar with, but that setup requires some device to be acting as a wireless router to run the network. There's no getting around that...somebody's got to run that show. On the ground, all your devices can connect to your home or office network and share data seamlessly. But in the air? You need to bring a wifi network with you, since there's no network infrastructure in the sky. (As I mentioned before, even the cell network isn't reliably available in the air. No wireless networks are. So whatever solution you use, you have to bring it with you in your plane.)

If there's a technological trick that the iFly folks are missing that would save them from needing a wireless router, I'm sure they'd love to hear about it. I'd be curious, too.