Hello everyone.
I’m thinking of buying a
Smart Controller to use litchi for waypoint mission. Can we download the litchi app from Google Play store, or we need the Amazon version ? This is a bit confusing, on Litchi’s Website they talk about using the Amazon Appstore but they say “you cannot have Litchi from Google’s Play Store installed on the same device as Litchi from Amazon’s Appstore.” Does that mean we get to choose ? Is one more stable than the other ? Coming from iOS, I don’t want to buy the wrong version and Google Play Store seems more logical to me.
Your feedback is greatly appreciated!
Hi There
I can give you a pretty direct answer to this. I'm a commercial drone operator and I have used Litchi heavily for the last few years with great success, I really love it. Although I always said I'd never get a
smart controller recently I had some credit unspent with my local authorised DJI dealer and as I couldn't think of anything else I needed at the time I decided to use it on a
smart controller. it's been out 18 months so I had some hopes it'd be debugged by now.
I decided that I wanted to run the google store version of Litchi mostly for the benefit of using google maps and it's really not too hard to side load google services and register the
smart controller as a development device (which is needed as the
Smart Controller is not a google certified device) to get access to the app store. I'm pretty tech savvy, actually very tech savvy but if you're not don't fret it's still easy enough that anyone could probably do it if they follow one of the tutorials around and take their time.
I've had it loaded that way for about a month now and to be honest if I had of known how it would have turned out I don't think I would have bothered. The
smart controller is not the most stable device to start with, yes a lot of people who use it only with Go4 in a vanilla fashion have only the occasional app crash and love the bright screen but for comparison I have not had a single app crash on an apple device in three years. 99% of crashes on the
smart controller are cause by "out of memory errors" which as it implies means the unit runs out of RAM. Essentially the
Smart Controller has the hardware specs of a three or more year old android tablet and a cheap one at that. It needs more RAM at the very least.
To make things worse it runs a 5 year old version of Android that has not been particularly well ported to the device. Cost cutting much DJI? and honestly, a Android device that doesn't come enabled for google services as standard? 0.o In a nut shell it's brilliantly well built and fundamentally flawed at the same time and before the DJI fanbois start, I have an exclusively DJI hanger and I really REALLY wanted to like this device. I know it's not a faulty unit because every issue I have is repeatable and well documented by other users.
There are certain steps as far as set up and sdcard size and others things that can and do improve stability and these I have researched and implemented but should you have to do that with something in that price range? Not in my eyes. So, after a week or so I had it running (fairly) stably as it came out of the box but then I add google services to the mix and of course now now THEY randomly close ... I suppose I can't complain, it didn't come from DJI supporting google services ...despite being android...but anyway, on top of that I am now having issued finding my Litchi flight plans on the
smart controller. They are there on the online mission hub, on my iPad mini 5, iPad pro, iPhone 8 Plus and Samsung S9+ but not on the
smart controller. I could probably find the answer but I've run out of s***s to give.
I'm about to reset the device to default and load the Amazon store version of litchi. I'm not saying you absolutely could never make the Google store version work but honestly, it shouldn't be this hard and I don't have time to debug it when I need to be flying.
So that's the long answer.
Short answer is to ask your self the following
Do you need total 100% reliability? If the answer is yes a
Smart Controller may not be for you
If you absolutely MUST have the google store version of Litchi and Google Maps then the
Smart Controller may not be for you.
If you can live with the occasional app crash, if Amazon Store Litchi with it's onboard maps are good enough for you and you really get off on beautifully designed and built ergonomically friendly hardware with a screen that can't be beaten for brightness and sharpness if not so much for size and the price is within your reach .. then buy it and ignore everything I said.
For me, if the Amazon version of Litchi disappoints then mine will either end up in the cupboard or for sale.
Regards
Ari