Updated July 20, 2023 (latest updates towards the bottom)

July 20, 2023
The Mini 2 Media Manager has been resolved by DJI - hooray! As such, we have updated the 360 Drone Booth app to incorporate this fix and is available in the Android Google Play Store.

Important note: Although this good news, we are recommending all existing users (and new users) move to the Mini 3 Pro as the drone of choice. The Mini 3 Pro does not have the “Gimbal Fighting” issue as seen in the mini SE and Mini 2, and is superior over the Mini 2 in terms of reliability, tracking, smooth motion, speed, safety, low light flying, speed of offloading of videos to the tablet, higher frame rate, portrait mode, the list goes on…

Below is an archive of the the history of this issue.

Issue:
The DJI Mini 2 Media Manger feature that is responsible to push videos to the Android application (when the drone lands each time) malfunctions upon initialization and causes video not to be transferred about half of the time. This causes sharing stations not to work well. This is either a SDK or firmware error that DJI has to fix. As such, the DJI Mini SE is the recommended drone if you have an event in the near future that you need the sharing station to work without issue.

Overview:
Providing as much transparency as possible to this issue is important to us. It is frustrating to have all development complete and be plagued with an issue we can resolve without DJI. DJI is a 3.5 billion dollar company, so getting them to move fast (or sometimes at all) is not easy. However we have their attention and we communicate nearly everyday with their support and engineering team. We are hopeful a fix on their side is in the very near future.

Here is a timeline of events that hopefully shed light on the issue and where things stand:

June 2022:
360 Motion Labs (and other third party developers using the SDK) report this issue to DJI. DJI does not acknowledge there is an issue in their media manager on there Mini 2 SDK.

July - August 2022:
Continue pressing DJI to review their SDK for the Mini 2.

September - October 2022:
DJI acknowledges there might be an issue but do not put any development cycles to look into the issue.

November - December 2022:
DJI starts to review the issue, but claims they can not repeat the issue. Picture Mosaics and other third party developers are outraged and can not understand why DJI can not repeat this issue on their side. 360 Motion Labs (and other third party developers) can reproduce the issue on their SDK test app.  

January 2023
360 Motion Labs begins weekly communications to try to come up with a plan to allow DJI to be able to repeat the issue. DJI reaches out to their Chinese development community and find developers in China that also experience the issue, but they have trouble getting a hold of the drones.

February 2023
360 Motion Lab begins daily communications with DJI to try to better understand the difference in their setup and what we are seeing in the US. Picture Mosaics shipped a Mini 2 with a complete setup to DJI so they have our exact setup to test, repeat the issue, and hopefully find a solution.

March 2023:
360 Motion Labs continues to work with Chinese customs and DJI to have the drone received by DJI. It is A LOT harder to get electronics into China then out of China. The drone was to be delivered Friday March 10th, however the Chinese government is slowing things down. We are hopeful that the drone is to be finally received to DJI headquarters on March 20, 2023. Once received we can reschedule our live conference calls the week of March 20th to ensure we have a plan moving forward in a relatively quick manor

March 2023 Update 2 (3/24/23):
So the Chinese government will not release the drone to DJI. It was literality at the last stage of being delivered, but DJI could not convivence the Chinese government to release the drone and tablet. All is not not lost, they have located a few drones from Chinese developers that experience the issue and plan to have them on location within the next week or so (at least that is what they have informed us).

More importantly, over the last month or so, we have been digging into work arounds with the current known limitations and errors in the SDK. With knowing what the root cause is, it is slow going but we are making progress. The work flow is the following: make a small change in the code, push out a test app, test the drone and app in a real world environment, record if anything did change, see it can be repeated, and then repeat the whole process. With rathre involved process, we are making progress and hopefully can report more by the end of next week.

We also strongly considered flying over to DJI HQ - we had started to make plans with the DJI engineering team, but with the current flying restrictions (see here), it is not advisable at this time.

April 3 2023 Update:
In the latest conversation with a core member of the DJI development team, William, he has stated “Trust me, we have prioritize this issue as must solve internally, we will seek any chance to reproduce and fix this in the next version.” Although he is not able to give an ETA.

We may try to send anther drone and tablet over to them this month, or figure out another way so they can reproduce the issue more cleaning, however there is no definite time line.

We have also exhausted all potential work arounds within the current SDK that we have access to. We could not find a order of operations that allowed for reliable access to the media manager on the Mini 2. Nevertheless, we have not given up, as we are still investing out-of-the-box options. Such options include wifi cards/adapters like this. The issue with this card/adapter is it uses a SPI communication, not SDIO communication.

We will remain hopeful that DJI resolves this issue soon or one of out-of-the-box options bears fruit.

In the mean time, we will be releasing a DIY guide to allow the mini SE controller to have a swappable batteries to allow uninterrupted flights - as this was the only draw back to using the mini SE (the controller battery life). Please stay tuned for this update and instructions on this page and our Facebook page over the next two weeks.

In DJI Mini 3 news, DJI plans to released there SDK this quartier (Q2 2023). We will begin development on that as soon as it is released.

June 8 2023 Update:

After several weeks of back and forth, and further communication with a few DJI representatives and connections, we have received this note form their development team:
”We have successfully reproduced the problem, thank you for your help. This issue has been given the highest priority and we will do our best to push it through to a fix.”

June 25 2023 Update:

Update from DJI:
”We have been working on resolving the issue you reported and we are happy to inform you that we have made progress. Once the fix has been validated, it will be included in the upcoming 4.17 release.

We understand that you may be eager to know the exact release date for version 4.17. However, we do not have a confirmed date yet. Rest assured that we are doing our best to release it as soon as possible.”

June 28 2023 Update:

Update from DJI:
“I wanted to provide you with an update regarding the release of version 4.17. Our current plan is to release it in either July or August. If all the issues pass the verification process smoothly, we should be able to release it as scheduled. However, please keep in mind that unexpected circumstances may arise, which could potentially cause a delay. Therefore, please consider this timeline as a reference only.”

We will keep you up to date with any further news.

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At the moment, the DJI Mini SE is the recommended drone if you have an event within the next month or two.

We will keep this page up to date with any new updates.