Let's talk about the zoom level
Ingress is about exploring the area. The Ingress drone is about virtually exploring an area. So why when you load the scanner does your circle occupy 80% of the width of the screen? And when you view the drone, that one portal is almost the only thing you can see?
You can change the zoom level, yes. But when you restart the app, it doesn't remember what zoom level you wanted and goes back to its default. And every time you go to the drone and also when you move it, the zoom level resets to the horrible one-portal view. When using the drone, I do want to see the rest of the map so that I know where I can move it to.
There are three ways to change the zoom level: pinch/stretch, double-tap-swipe and single-tap. That last one is the confusing one (plus, when the drone screen loads it's incredibly easy to accidentally single-tap on a portal, because portals are too easy to select when zoomed in, and that doesn't help you to change the zoom level).
If you single-tap anywhere on the drone screen, assuming you didn't accidentally hit a portal, it zooms out (although not quite all the way). It's as if the programmers knew their default zoom level wasn't the right one.
Single-tapping on the home map screen doesn't usually do anything. But bring up bursters and then tap on the map screen and it suddenly zooms in. This is incredibly easy to do accidentally while firing bursters and I think it's completely unnecessary and unhelpful. Exit from bursters and you are still zoomed in, but single-tap on the map and it zooms out again. This behaviour is just weird.
Comments
Ingress is about exploring the area. The Ingress drone is about virtually exploring an area. So why when you load the scanner does your circle occupy 80% of the width of the screen? And when you view the drone, that one portal is almost the only thing you can see?
This was a thing that they started doing with redacted in 2016. That's at least when I noticed less activity in the map at the edges. I thought it was obvious on why because of API calls. You reduce a certain percentage of requests to the server and it helps drive down cost and serverload.
You can achieve a better range with the drone when you have a key to a further portal because you are calling that specific portal. When you go back to the previous screen, you are now looking at the portals in the usual range + the portal key you have.
This functionality might not even require a key since we have direct permalinks to any portal from intel to then access via the app. The game even is aware when you're deeplinking to another portal while in the remote view! It's letting you know that pressing back will go to the remote view of the next portal you requested for.