Workalitic Is Now on Android, and It's Built for the Person Holding the Wrench

No dashboards were squeezed onto a six-inch screen in the making of this app.

Workalitic is our work order and inventory platform for small field service teams. Think HVAC crews, maintenance companies, property managers, electricians. Most of them come to us running the business out of a WhatsApp group and a spreadsheet that exactly one person understands.

As of today, the Workalitic app is on Google Play. iOS is next.

The Web App Already Worked on Phones

Workalitic has run in a mobile browser since day one. You can pin it to your home screen and it keeps working when the connection drops. For a manager checking on the day between two meetings, that’s plenty.

Now picture a technician in a boiler room, gloves on, torch in the other hand, trying to find the right work order in a full web layout. They’ll tell themselves they’ll “fill it in later.” Later usually means never.

That’s the bit we cared about. Everything Workalitic does for a manager (reports, costs, stock levels) depends on the person in the field recording what they did. If that takes too many taps, they skip it, and the manager’s numbers quietly go wrong.

So we didn’t port the web app. We asked what a technician actually does on a job, in what order, and built the app around that.

What’s in It

The app covers two Workalitic roles. Employees do the work. Viewers need to see what’s going on but can’t change anything. Admins and managers stay on the web, where planning and dispatch make more sense on a big screen anyway.

A technician opens the app and sees their assigned jobs first. Search and filters are there for anything else. On a job they can clock in and out with one tap, and those hours go straight into the reports their manager already reads.

They can move a job to In Progress, or mark it Blocked when they’re waiting on a part or someone forgot to leave the keys. Blocked was the status we cared most about. Managers see it right away, instead of hearing about it on Friday.

Checklists get ticked off on site. Comments stay on the job for whoever picks it up next. Materials are tracked the whole way: picked up from the warehouse, used on site, the leftovers returned. Stock updates in real time, which matters more than it sounds. Nobody wants to drive across town for a part that someone else took an hour ago.

You can also take before-and-after photos with the camera and attach them to the job, and push notifications tell you when you’ve been assigned something. You choose which notifications you get.

Viewers see the same screens, minus the buttons. We didn’t want to show anyone a button that only exists to tell them they’re not allowed to press it.

The Boring Work

The feature list is the easy part to write. Most of the build went into things you only notice when they’re broken.

Bad signal was the big one. A lot of field work happens in basements and on rooftops, where one bar of signal is a good day. The app knows when it’s offline, says so plainly, and doesn’t pretend something saved when it didn’t. A technician who thinks they logged three valves and didn’t is worse off than one who knows to try again.

Permissions come from the platform, not from the phone. When a manager changes someone’s role on the web, the app follows. If the app and the server each keep their own list of who can do what, sooner or later they disagree, and someone taps a button the server then rejects.

Logins stay out of the way. Tokens live in the phone’s secure storage and refresh in the background, so a technician on a shared work phone isn’t typing a password at 7 AM every day. Apps that make you do that tend to get uninstalled.

It’s built with Expo and React Native, the same stack we use for client mobile work. That was on purpose. We’d rather recommend a stack we’ve shipped and supported ourselves, with real users who complain when it breaks. We’ve written about one Android-specific headache with it in our notes on the 16 KB page size migration.

Why We Bother

Workalitic sits alongside Arheev and Omnotic as products we run ourselves. Each one has taught us something we later used on client work, and the clients didn’t have to pay for the lesson.

This one reminded us that a web app that “works on mobile” can still be a pain for someone standing in a boiler room. Responsive CSS fixes the layout. It doesn’t fix the number of taps.

Try It

If you run a field service team, Workalitic has a 30-day free trial with every feature and no credit card. Set up a few work orders on the web, then put the Android app on your technicians’ phones.

If you’re thinking about building a mobile app of your own, for your team or your customers, talk to us. It’s what we do.

No technicians were asked to fill in a form twice. That was the whole point.