As it happens I questioned “DJI_Stephen” of the DJI Forum yesterday, a DJI Moderator and self professed expert in these matters, when he claimed that using 3rd Party Apps invalidated any warranty claim in a thread about Litchi and other products.
My counter argument was that since DJI had provided the Litchi developers, and other developers, with the SDK that such a statement was erroneously misleading. Add to this that when we purchase a DJI product we are buying the hardware only as no physical copy of the “recommended” software is included in the box. To intimate anything different would essentially infer that we are merely leasing the product, and we should accept that our use of that product can be limited or denied at the manufacturers discretion or whim. A practice that DJI have enacted in the past.
At least when 3DR ceased production of the Solo they released all the supporting software and documentation into the public domain, and continued to honour all warranties until their expiration dates, irrespective of what software and firmware was in use.
DJI wouldn’t release an SDK to allow other people to develop apps if it then meant they wouldn’t pay out on a warranty claim.
If the app was the cause of a crash then fair enough, that’s a risk we all take when using third party “anything”, but these apps are so well established now that the odds are ridiculously low.
Litchi for example, they have over 4,000 flights per DAY with their software. If there was a bug causing crashes they (and we) would have known about it long before now.
Legally, the ability to fly in follow-me mode without VLoS only applies in the Open A1 subcategory i.e. for sub-250g drones. You’ll find it in CAP1789A UAS.OPEN.020(3), but not in UAS.OPEN.030 (which is A2) and not in UAS.OPEN.040 (which is A3). In trying to keep the Drone Code simple and easy to follow, the CAA have missed out some of the technicalities … like this one.
Which is the same as what the Drone Code says. But CAP722 is clear, like the regulations, that this only applies in Open A1. The Drone Code misses that out. Anyway, getting off-topic!
But surely that is the main point of Beta’s and us being Guinea Pigs, test on different devices that they maybe don’t have, and different environments too, makes for a more stable final release
I remember doing Beta’s for software developers back in the mid to late 80’s on the C64, had to wait weeks for the tapes to arrive, no wonder it took months to release new games lol
Punched card installations in the late 70s, always had some spare punched rectangles & sellotape to fix typos.
But we digress. DJI’s terms don’t say it has to be DJI software, says not authorised by DJI and as said, if they allow a developer to use their SDK then surely that’s approval?
.. 60s, for me, in a computer that had been installed without consideration for the heat produced (which was effing immense!), so that it could only be run for a couple of hours. And since it was SLOW … not much could be done.
3980 today
