Android Developer Consultancy: In-App Plot Imaging for Ona

About the role

THE ORGANIZATION The Alliance of Bioversity International (www.bioversityinternational.org) and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) (www.ciat.cgiar.org) delivers research-based solutions that harness agricultural biodiversity and sustainably transform food systems to improve people’s lives. Alliance solutions address the global crises of malnutrition, climate change, biodiversity loss, and environmental degradation. With novel partnerships, the Alliance generates evidence and mainstreams innovations to transform food systems and landscapes so that they sustain the planet, drive prosperity, and nourish people in a climate crisis. The Alliance is part of CGIAR, a global research partnership for a food-secure future. 1. Background: The Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT seeks a senior Android developer for a 3-month consultancy. The goal is to capture a whole-plot image inside the Ona app, so breeders no longer switch to the phone's native camera. Ona is a mobile and web digital phenotyping tool for on-station breeding teams in Sub-Saharan Africa. It runs at Alliance sites and with national partners such as TARI in Tanzania, Uganda and Malawi. Ona covers common bean, cowpea and sorghum, with more crops coming. Breeders use an Android phone, often mounted on the Bruno physical aid, to image plots. Machine-learning models then extract traits such as plant stand, flower count and pod count. Plant stand (number of established plants per plot) is measured from one image of the full plot. A standard plot row is about 4 m long. Today this image is a panorama taken with the phone's native camera app. 2. Problem statement The panorama step breaks the Ona workflow: users leave Ona, take the panorama in the native camera, then return and link the image to the right plot. This adds time and errors at scale. • Time. Switching between apps adds time to every plot, which adds up across large trials. • Data integrity. Images taken outside Ona can be linked to the wrong plot, lost, or saved without Ona metadata (plot ID, GPS, timestamp, device, capture settings). • Inconsistency. Native panorama behaviour, resolution and stitching differ by phone brand and Android version. This makes model input less consistent. • Hard to build. Two Ona developers looked at in-app panorama capture. Android has no standard panorama API, and real-time stitching on low- and mid-range phones is hard. They concluded it needs specialist skills. We are