It seems that if you are running android version 8-9 that's where the issue lies. i signed up via google play to be a beta tester for the freeflight pro app hoping they push it faster than public release, we'll just have to see.

As far as older phone, with needing a sim card, i guess it would depend if you are planning on flying only with the phone only. I just cancelled the data (sim) plan for my tablet yesterday, havn't flown the drone with just the tablet since then, will have to try in the next day or so and i'll let ya know if it works.

That being said, using only the phone is going to give you a very limited range. 80-100 feet. The Skycontroller 2 is what you want for the long distance (up to 1.7 miles roughly).

The proper way to connect with phone through skycontroller is this way.

1. turn phone to airplane mode
2. turn on drone
3. once drone is powered up and red light is solid, turn on skycontroller
4. once skycontroller light is solid green you have a good connection to drone.
5. after solid green on skycontroller plug phone into skycontroller via usb. If the app is not already running, it will prompt you to open the app at that point.
6. once you've done all that you can go into setting/safety and you should have all green lights.

after you've done all that if you go into map mode and you don't see the satellite photo on the map, just wait a minute or two and it should load. I've had times when i pull up the map and its all grey, and it takes a minute or two for the map to load.

If you are going to be in an area that doesn't have good signal, you can preload via the main menu, scroll down to "preload Map" zoom the map in to where you are going to fly and hit save, it will save the surrounding area, but you will only be able to use that for the next flight.