Release Announcement – SketchUp Viewer V4 for iOS & Android Now Available!

@TheGuz I hereby revoke your privilege to call me “Friend”.

The remainder of the Android compatibility paragraph, combined with a short amount of web research, leads me to believe that Trimble has made a big mistake to include AR (via ARCore) in this purported “Upgrade” to the SketchUp Viewer.

Looking at list of devices with ARCore compliance, I saw none that are tablets. Yes, they’re ALL phones.

I have both. A tablet and a phone. Guess which I love to use with SketchUp Viewer? Right - the tablet. The screen on the phone is just too small to be useful for most tasks where I find Viewer useful. I keep a copy on my phone just in case I want to give a quick glimpse of something I’m working on to someone I meet.

And my phone copy? It already automatically updated to version 4. And it found my previous purchase and gave me “1 year free access to premium features”. So I took a look:

  • Indeed, the AR feature is enabled
  • It took a bit until I found the entity info feature. And it’s useless for me. Why? The first tap gives me only the information that I’ve selected a component or group. I have to double tap to open it, then maneuver to tap on the feature I want to examine - which is often another component or group. It just takes too long - with a well constructed model - to dig down to a place where Entity Info gives you useful information - I can see where it would be easier on the larger screen of a tablet - but OOPS - it won’t work on tablets!

I think Trimble would have been far better off by NOT requiring installation on an ARCore compliant device, then offering the “premium” feature of AR use only from devices that are ARCore compliant.

Thus what you’ve done, going forward, is prevented any new installations of the Viewer on Android tablets. And previous paid users happily using it on their tablet from ever getting any new, non ARCore dependent features.

And fragmentation - schmagmentation! Both my phone (Pixel XL) and tablet (Pixel C) are pure Android devices using Google’s official Android release, with no changes (fragmentations) imposed by carriers or manufacturers (aka bloatware).

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As I recall viewer was originally developed to give clients with no experience or ability to view or use SketchUp files the ability or means to View files without having to learn how to use SketchUp so they could communicate with users of the SketchUp program that we’re developing models for those clients. It looks like you’ve totally abandoned that idea chasing some new virtual reality technology based application.

Thanks for the feedback Steven.

You are correct that the list of devices currently supporting Android’s AR Core are limited so some phones and not tablets. AR core is relatively new, and I expect that landscape to change/grow over time.

We are working to replicate and assess the issues you’re seeing with respect to the incompatibility errors when trying to upgrade to V4 on your tablet. The upgrade, by design, should be available to all Android customers whose devices meet some minimum hardware specs (outlined on the GPlay app details page) but should not be restricting devices like yours. We tested the ability to upgrade on non-ARCore compatible devices before launching, and did not run into issues with the collection of Android devices we have in our QA Lab. Will update this thread with updates as we work to uncover whatever issue may be preventing upgrades on Android devices that should be able to upgrade. In the mean time, if you wouldn’t mind please just confirming that you’re signed into your tablet with the account associated with your original app purchase, that would be helpful.

The select/entity info features are by design, intended to mimic those found in the desktop. If you have any suggestions about how these features could be made more user friendly/intuitive for other hardware/mobile OS platforms, we’d gladly take those suggestions into consideration.

Oh, and @guz is one of the nicest and most genuinely helpful folks I’ve ever met – you should give him another chance at friendship :wink:

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@mics_54 With this most recent update, making SketchUp Viewer free for all, I think we’re now a big step closer to that original vision. Curious to learn more about why you feel otherwise.

Yes. I am signed into the tablet with the account associated with my original app purchase. I have always had only 1 Google account associated with Google Play - and it goes back to my first Android phone many years ago.

And should I ever meet @TheGuz in person, I’ll be happy to give him another chance. Until then, I’ll continue to have a negative connotation in my mind regarding him, as he was the SketchUp Team Member that delivered what I consider to be nasty news in a forum post that began: “Hey Friends!” Is it blaming the messenger? Yes, and that’s something I don’t normally do. And I likely wouldn’t have done it here if the news hadn’t been delivered to me in the middle of my trying to unravel a bureaucratic Catch 22 regarding my health insurance - causing my anger level to be high before I started!

Good luck with the other health insurance thing, sorry to hear that your day is a bit off the rails, and more so that we contributed to the not-so-great side of the scales.

@mics_54 Thanks for reporting the issue. We’re looking into it and hope to have a fix in place soon. Apologies for the trouble.

Thanks for the additional notes about the app missing from search results. That was helpful in tracking down the issue & we’ll be working to fix that too.

I’ve posted a few additional notes regarding upgrades for Android customers, and put them over in the Android category. If folks have any feedback, questions, or issues upgrading on Android, let’s have that chat over here. Thanks all!

Nothing personal taken. I understand that we all have to deal with things bigger and more important than a software update. That being said, we take all feedback seriously and will be working to improve your experience with updates in development now. Best of luck with the insurance fiasco!

Is it up to the customer to know which iPhone supports ARKit? Are Trimble happy to take people’s money for the subscription in iOS SketchUp viewer without even checking that the device is compatible?

You can still be my friend:)

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@McGordon On the contrary, we do run compatibility checks on iOS to ensure that folks are on an ARKit enabled device before allowing them to purchase a subscription. Compatibility info is listed on the app details page on Apple’s App Store:

“The AR feature uses ARKit and is compatible with iPhone 6s and newer, iPad Pro, or any 2017 iPad or newer, running iOS 11 or newer.”

If you experience what you believe to be any false negatives (i.e. the App Store allows you to subscribe on an incompatible device) please let us know so we can investigate further.

Thanks!

Can people using iOs devices that aren’t ARKit enabled still download and install the iOs version of V4 - and are only prevented from subscribing to the AR features?

I’d test, but I just recycled my last iOs device.

The compatibility info may be listed in the App Store, but I wouldn’t normally go there when doing an update, so I see this text instead, which makes no mention of compatible devices:

Yes, I think I am seeing that, but I’d call it a false positve. I did mention this in the 2nd post in this thread about a day ago. I’m on an iPhone 6, which doesn’t support ARKit. I had to find that out by checking on Apple’s website. I can’t get a free year’s subscription from already having purchased the app on 30th July 2015 and I have the option of clicking the red button “Subscribe £9.49 / yr”. I’m not going to click the button and lose money just to test it for you, but I think you should know that’s what it looks like on an unsupported device.

I updated from an older version, but I would assume that you can download it as a new app on a device that doesn’t support ARKit. The upgrade is a big improvement, just don’t click that red subscribe button on a non ARKit device.

This update is HUGE!! Thank you SketchUp team, great work! :clap:

There’s a little bug with the tape measure tool: there’s Km multiple time in the decimal units selection, instead of cm and m. I’m sure you’ll fix that soon.
Moreover you could delete Dropbox under Account setting, since it’s already integrated into iOS Files browser.

Yup, I can confirm that. My old iPad Air downloaded the update successfully, but says it isn’t ARKit compatible, while the new iPad G6 i just bought did update and run the ARKit part.

That said, I think I need some tutorial on how to use the ARKit feature.

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What (native) language do you have set?
I only have: millimeter,centimeter and meter (Dutch)

Mine is Italian, here’s a screenshot

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This is great news but when I tried to install it on my LG G6 and Samsung Tablet, it says it isn’t compatible. Is a version for the G6 coming out soon?