It’s been 3 months since we launched Mendeley for Android on Google Play.  The response so far has been overwhelmingly positive, with over one thousand 5-star reviews, and an average rating of 4.61.  Thank you all so much for helping to spread the word.

In our launch announcement, we let you know what was coming up next, and now just wanted to quickly recap with the work we’ve done, the stuff we’re doing now, and where we’re going in future.

We’ve had 4 feature releases in 3 months, and we’re very happy with our ability to keep the pace up, respond to feedback, and give everyone the App we know they need. Here’s the major additions and changes from v1.0 to v1.4 (released today):

Recently Read (v1.4)

Earlier this year we rolled out a new Recently Read filter in Mendeley Desktop & iOS, to allow you to much more easily start reading on one device, and then continue reading directly where you left off on another device. This is now available on Android, and will be available in the web App in the next month or so.

The recently read list stores up to 20 recently read documents, including the page number and the position you last scrolled to in the document. It works offline too, just remember to press sync when you have an internet connection again.

SD Card storage (v1.4)

In Settings, you’ll find a new experimental setting to allow you to choose between storing downloaded PDFs on your device, or on external storage such as an SD card. We have limited devices here for testing (all Samsung), so please be aware that there may still be issues.

Note: Currently SD card storage is only available in Android KitKat and above, due to limitations in the older Android APIs.

Edit document notes (v1.3)

The Notes tab on a document will now let you tap in it and start typing straight away. Select words or phrases to add bold, italics, or underlines for emphasis. All your notes will be synced to the cloud automatically.

Sync all files setting (v1.2)

Overwhelmingly our top feature request after v1.0 was released. In Settings, you’ll find a new setting called Sync all files. When this is enabled, when you press sync the app will attempt to download all available PDF files that have not yet been downloaded. This has been asked for by a lot of you, but please be aware this could initially take a long time, use a lot of data, and take up a lot of storage space on your device. So please do this on a wifi connection if possible.

Jump to page (v1.1)

When scrolling a PDF you will now see an indicator in the bottom left telling you which page you’re on, and how many pages are in the document.

Tap on this indicator and type in the number of a page, to jump directly to it.

Stability

We’ve been keeping a careful eye on crashes, and fixing them as quickly as we can.  We have an internal target , which is to ensure that 98% of users in any given time period have not seen a crash.  This is really just our “warning sign” level though, and it’s quite a low bar. In reality, we’re trending at around 99.5%, and try to keep this as close to 100% as we can.

And more…

• Remove from folder
• Prompt to sign in again if password has been changed
• Added tags to search index
• A ton of bug fixes

The future

For the last couple of months we’ve been running an experiment in open roadmaps. We’ve created a public roadmap on Trello that you can check at any time, and see the status of the major features we’re working on now, what’s planned for the next release, and what’s planned for 1-3 months after that.  Subscribe to cards to see when they change status, comment, or vote.

It’s still an experiment, but we’re hoping everyone appreciates the transparency, and that it allows us to work together with the community to make better products.

In the sort term, we’re working on adding in folder management features, better filtering by tag, and metadata fetching improvements.