Reply Sky Dragon

This is an answer to a specific question/comment on Googe Play, regarding opening external experiments.

If I understood the problem correctly, the situation is like this: phyphox is running as expected with all of its internal experiments, but an experiment created with the experiment editor (http://phyphox.org/editor) could not be opened in phyphox on this device.

First, I’d like to give a little technical detail, which is that all internal experiments of phyphox are defined in exactly the same way. So, if phyphox can run its internal experiments, it is in principle able to load the file format. But there are two things, which might still go wrong and because of the wording I suspect that the second one is the problem.

  1. There might be a problem with the downloaded experiment. The editor is a quite massive piece of software, which is not used by many users. I am quite sure that there are still a few bugs in there and if phyphox opens the file and gives an error, it is quite likely that phyphox was right in giving an error because the editor made a mistake while generating the file. In this case, please tell me the error message or, even better, send me the file that cannot be opened.
  2. The smartphone does not even offer to open the file in phyphox. Since (at the moment) you can only download an experiment and have to transfer it manually to your phone, you eventually end up with the experiment in a specific app on your phone. This might be a download manager (maybe as simple as the app shown as "Downloads"), a file manager or a specific app like Dropbox, WhatsApp or a mail client. In theory, when tapping the experiment file in this app, phyphox should open right away or at least the system should offer a list of apps from which you can pick phyphox to open the file.

    Unfortunately, there are few apps for which it is impossible for us to do this. If the app simply offers the file as "/path/to/the/tile.phyphox" we can simply tell Android to open any file ending on phyphox in our app, which works great. But if the app uses an alternative approach, offering an anonymous path like "/export/12345678" (especially without the ending phyphox), there is no way to tell that this is supposed to be opened in phyphox. In these cases the app from which you open the file gives some more information like the file type. So Android still knows that a PDF offered in this way should be opened by a reader and a JPG with an image viewer. But since a phyphox-file is no common format, they usually just tell that it is an unknown file – which is still fine, because we can tell Android to offer phyphox for unknown files.

    Then there are still some apps, which do not even tell that the file format is unknown. If they do not recognize the file format, they leave this information empty (for example some Samsung download and file manager apps do this) and that is the situation, in which we cannot do anything. We could tell Android to open any file format in phyphox, but then Android would even ask if you opened an image file or a calender entry, which would be very annoying.

    So, if this is the case for you, at the moment my only suggestion is to try a different app. Maybe just a different method you are already using, like mailing the file to yourself or putting it in a Dropbox (the Dropbox app works). If you downloaded it to your phone, try a different file manager (for example ES File Explorer works).

    Finally, I just encountered a little possible problem: My browser renamed the file to "experiment.phyphox.txt" – Just make sure that the ending is just ".phyphox"…

I hope, this solves your problem. Sorry, that it is so complicated at the moment – we are working on a better solution, which will hopefully be out in a few months. If you want to reply with more details, I suggest you do this via email (kuhlen@physik.rwth-aachen.de) as we do not have the character limit of Google Play.