Tag: releases

Here’s another QField release, packed with the features that have been at the top of professional surveyors’ wish list! (hint: it’s in the title) — plus improvements across the board for our wide range of users.

Main highlights

NTRIP & Bluetooth Low Energy

First up, NTRIP support has been added in QField unlocking sub-centimeter accuracy position readings without the need for any third-party app. This has long been requested by cadastral surveyors and other professional field workers in need of highly accurate data where being a few centimeters off can have real consequences.

To configure an NTRIP connection, simply connect to an RTK capable GNSS device via Bluetooth, BLE or TCP from the QField settings positioning panel. Once connected, the NTRIP user interface will be visible just below the positioning devices combo box in the same panel.

From there, users can enter their NTRIP caster details and enable the connection. An NTRIP visual indicator has been added at the top of the map canvas positioning information panel overlay to reflect the status of the connection. A blue dot means everything’s working, a glowing orange dot means the connection has stopped receiving correction data, and a gray dot means the connection has turned off.

Moving onto another functionality that walks hand in hand with NTRIP: QField now supports connecting to external GNSS devices via Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). This means a whole array of GNSS devices can now talk directly to QField on iOS as well, simplifying workflows for field surveyors working on this platform. While the benefit is most visible on iOS as QField previously lacked the ability to talk through Bluetooth altogether on that platform, BLE connections are also available on Android, Windows, and Linux. In many cases, it can offer a more stable connection.

The development of these fantastic features was supported by two QField hardware partners: HappySurvey and ArduSimple. Their support meant we were able to focus on getting the best possible experience running on their devices. Other hardware will definitively work out of the box too, and we’d love to hear about your experiences. However, since we are dealing with functionalities that are often driven by vendor-specific commands and UUIDs, there’s plenty of room to grow when it comes to compatibility. So if you’re a hardware vendor, feel free to reach out, join our certified hardware program and support QField’s growth! :)

Moving on to another noteworthy newly-added functionalities.

Feature form improvements

Starting with QField 4.2, the feature form includes a new gallery editor which shows previews of image, video, and audio content from relationships where the child layer has one or more attachment attributes. It will turn itself on automatically whenever QField detects this setup. The gallery editor also offers a quick snap button allowing for a much faster workflow around photo and video capture. And yes, we’ve updated our notes layer to support this when creating projects using QField.

Another feature form improvement is a wizard mode, which turns a complex set of tabs into a simple, linear flow guided by next and previous buttons that respond to constraints. driven by an easy to use pair of next and previous buttons that are reacting to constraints. The wizard mode is a per-project setting that can be enabled when setting up projects in QGIS. Simply make sure QFieldSync is installed to see the configuration panel in the project properties dialog.

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Feature identification in 3D, and more

Users enjoying QField’s recent addition of 3D views will be delighted by what’s coming next. Feature identification by tapping on the terrain in 3D map views is now possible. This removes the need to switch back and forth between 2D and 3D to do attribute editing or getting more information on a nearby point of interest during 3D-enhanced hikes through your favorite national park.

There are countless more improvements that would transform this announcement into a full on essay ;) to highlight a few more:

• A new project information popup accessible via the side dashboard displays crucial project metadata such as the title, the abstract description, and the author(s).

• The features list now reflects attribute table’s row conditional styling configured in QGIS, providing a nice way to add visual hints to make features in need of attention pop out in the list;

• Audio attachments now show a level preview that helps identify key parts of a clip during playback.

• Lines and polygons digitized using a stylus in freehand mode are now smoother with cleaner geometries containing fewer redundant vertices; and

As always, the full changelog is available over here for even more goodies.

A flood of QFieldCloud improvements

This new version of QField is packed with QFieldCloud improvements. The biggest one is the retirement of the cloud projects ‘community’ tab in favor of a completely revamped – and we believe improved – experience around cloud project searching and filtering. Users can now easily filter projects by organization and teammate ownership as well as by keywords. The new user interface also makes searching through the countless cloud projects that have been made public by authors around the world far more intuitive.

A brand new cloud storage indicator has been added to QField to let users know of their current used and remaining storage size. This will help users keep on top of their storage and provide an early warning when space is about to run out. Upgrades are available for users to keep working on these growing cloud projects that were started using the free community plan .

Beyond that, we’ve been hard at work hunting bugs and increasing the overall stability. We’ve also transformed a number of obscure and intimidating error messages into helpful notifications.

‘Coral Sea’ release name

The Coral Sea stretches across the southwest Pacific, bordered by Australia, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu. Home to the Great Barrier Reef and some of the most biodiverse coastal ecosystems on the planet, it is also one of the most climate-pressured, with bleaching events and coastal change outpacing many monitoring programs.

Field workers across the region are already responding with QField: mapping seagrass and mangroves for blue carbon conservation with the MACBLUE project , building national environmental monitoring capacity through SPREP’s regional GIS training , running standardized tropical field data collection at the Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research , and driving land cover surveys across 10 Pacific Island nations through Digital Earth Pacific and the maplandscape project .

At OPENGIS.ch, the Coral Sea is a reminder that the places most in need of reliable field data are often the hardest to reach. That is precisely what QField is built for.

Happy field mapping!

QField’s first release of the year comes packed with new features as well as a bundle of improvements and polishing. Let’s jump right into it.

Main highlights

3D

This new version of QField comes with a shiny 3D map view, giving users the ability to render their map content on top of a three-dimensional terrain.

Users can rotate the terrain geometry to get a better understanding of elevation profiles, while also adjusting the plane’s extent by panning and zooming with drag and pinch gestures. When the GNSS positioning service is enabled, the user’s current position, as well as ongoing tracking sessions, will be overlaid on top of the 3D terrain geometry.

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By default, QField relies on Mapzen Global Terrain tiles to determine terrain elevation. As its name indicates, this is a 30-meter digital elevation model covering the globe and hosted online, which allows QField to render 3D views without any user configuration. But it does not stop there. QField supports additional elevation sources, such as disk-based GeoTIFFs, to work in offline areas. This can be configured when setting up a project by changing the terrain type in QGIS.

COGO operations

Moving on to the next major functionality introduced in this new version: a COGO (Coordinate Geometry) framework to support fieldwork through a set of parameter-driven operations to generate vertices. This has been one of the most requested features by professional land surveyors, so we couldn’t be more excited to deliver it and hear back from our community.

QField 4.1 ships with three COGO tools:

• The XYZ parameters operation generates vertices based on a manually entered pair of X and Y coordinates as well as an optional Z value;
• The distance/angle from point operation generates vertices based on distance and angle values from a given point; and
• The circles’ intersection operation generates vertices at the intersection of two circles, each defined by a point and a radius.

Leveraging QField’s capabilities, a COGO operation’s point parameter can be defined in multiple ways: users can enter values manually or automatically fill in the parameter using either the current GNSS position, the geometry of a pre-existing feature within a point layer, or the coordinate cursor’s location. The latter is super useful when coupled with project snapping.

There’s more

Beyond these two flagship features, this new version contains tons of improvements.

We’re happy to report that the background tracking functionality introduced for Android last year is now available on iOS. Users can now save battery by locking their phone while QField continues to track positions. Upon reopening QField, the collected positions will be written into your project. No Apple will be left behind.

The feature form continued to receive improvements during this development cycle. Starting with this version, Remember Last Value pins are hidden by default. Moving away from an always-shown interface, remember last value pin visibility can now be configured per field. Using the latest QGIS (4.0 and above), users can configure the presence of the pin and whether remembrance should be active by default in the vector layer properties’ attribute form panel.

Position tracking has received a lot of attention during this development cycle focused on optimizations. Tracking is now friendlier to your device battery while user interface responsiveness has been improved when tracking sessions are ongoing. We’ve also spent some time making Bluetooth connections to external GNSS devices even more reliable. If this was an issue for you in the past, give this version a try again.

Finally, something to please our advanced users: QField now offers the ability to tunnel network traffic through a proxy that can be enabled and configured in the settings panel.

‘Barents Sea’ release name

The Barents Sea, a marginal sea of the Arctic Ocean bordered by Norway and Russia, is one of the most ecologically and geopolitically significant water bodies on the planet. Home to some of the world’s largest cod and haddock fisheries, it sustains both marine ecosystems and the livelihoods of coastal communities across the high north. Its waters are a barometer for our changing climate: the Barents Sea is the fastest-warming part of the Arctic, making it a critical area of scientific observation and environmental monitoring. The Nansen Legacy project has been tracking these changes closely (factsheet ).

At OPENGIS.ch, we see the Barents Sea as a powerful symbol of why field data collection matters. Understanding and protecting remote, extreme environments like the Arctic requires tools that are reliable, offline-capable, and built for real-world conditions. That is precisely what QField is designed to deliver.

With QField 4.1 ‘Barents Sea’, we continue building on that mission, bringing new capabilities to field workers, researchers, and environmental stewards wherever their work takes them.

Happy field mapping!

Just in time for the end of 2025, QField 4.0 is now available in a virtual store near you. This release brings significant improvements and marks an important usability milestone, worthy of a new major version. It’s truly never been easier to get started with QField - whether you’re a seasoned GIS professional or new to spatial data collection.

Main highlights

One of the most significant feature additions in this new version is right there on the welcome screen: a simple wizard for creating new projects. The wizard guides users through a set of questions covering the desired basemap style and actions such as note taking and position tracking. These projects can be published directly on QFieldCloud , so users can upload images, notes, and tracks that are accessible through web browsers or QGIS using QFieldSync.

The project creation framework also unlocked another feature we’re proud of: on-the-fly conversion of imported projects to cloud projects. The ability to upgrade pre-existing projects to cloud projects means that users can push spatial data and attachments residing on their devices to QFieldCloud and instantly collaborate with coworkers.

On the QFieldCloud front, we’ve done significant code refactoring to make synchronization and attachment uploads even more reliable. Users now see a progress bar showing attachment upload status.

The cloud projects list also lets users push changes and sync projects without opening them first. Indicator badges show whether you have pending local changes or if updates are available from the cloud.

A leaner, clearer, and more focused user interface

Early on in this development cycle, our ninjas decided to make a significant leap forward with QField’s UX focusing on making the user interface leaner when possible, clearer when needed, and more focused throughout.

QField now has a vastly more readable feature form when viewing feature attributes. We’ve also made the interface more consistent by updating all editor widgets to use Qt’s Material style, so comboboxes, text fields, and other elements now have a unified look.

We’ve also simplified the user experience around positioning. The map canvas now has a single positioning button at the bottom right. Click the location marker overlay to reveal a new pie menu with quick access to positioning features: start tracking sessions, copy position to clipboard, show the positioning panel, lock the coordinate cursor to position, lock the map canvas to position, and add bookmarks at your position.

Now when users set accuracy thresholds, tracking sessions and averaged positioning will automatically filter out “bad accuracy” readings.

QField also animates transitions when jumping to your GNSS position, features, or coordinates, making navigation feel smoother and more intuitive.

Wait, there’s more

Beyond these major improvements, QField 4.0 includes tons of new features:

• Multilingual projects - a feature we added to QGIS several years ago - are now supported in QField
• When connected to the internet, QField now displays online legend graphics for WMS and Esri map services, providing crucial context for field users
• Additional feature form widgets are now supported, including the spacer widget and color editor widget, further improving interoperability with QGIS

A complete list of changes is available in the QField release notes on GitHub.

A new release cycle focused on water bodies

With the QField 4.X series, we’re introducing a new naming theme focused on water bodies.

Oceans, rivers, lakes, wetlands, and coastal waters are fundamental to life on Earth. They provide drinking water, support ecosystems and agriculture, regulate climate, and sustain communities worldwide. Yet these vital resources are increasingly under pressure from pollution, overuse, and climate change.

At OPENGIS.ch, we believe that better spatial data leads to better decisions. By making field data collection easier and more accessible, we aim to support those working to understand, protect, and manage these fragile systems. Dedicating this release cycle to water bodies reflects our commitment to using technology responsibly and connects naturally with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, which we consistently strive to support through our work.

For the first release in this cycle, we chose a water body of particular significance to QField: Switzerland’s longest river entirely within the country, Aare.

As always, we hope you enjoy this new release.

Happy field mapping!