/portal/tech is the tech-side mobile view — phone-optimized, big tap targets, and most importantly, it keeps working when the network drops. Available on Bundle and Front Office plans.
Installing it as a real app on the phone
Plyrium's tech app is a Progressive Web App (PWA), which means it installs from the browser as a phone-home-screen icon — no App Store review, no separate download, and updates push instantly.
- 1Open Safari (iPhone) or Chrome (Android) on the tech's phone
Other browsers work but Add-to-Home-Screen lives in the share menu of these two.
- 2Sign in to plyrium.com on the phone, navigate to /portal/tech
The 'Install Plyrium app' banner appears at the top.
- 3Follow the platform-specific install prompts
iOS: Share button → Add to Home Screen. Android: Chrome's three-dot menu → Install app. The icon lands on the home screen and opens fullscreen, no browser chrome.
Skip the banner: open /portal/install (works on the phone OR a desktop, in case you're walking the tech through it remotely).
What the tech sees
- Today / Tomorrow appointment buckets with big tap-target status buttons (On the way / Arrived / Running late / Completed).
- Embedded route map with numbered pins + total miles + a one-tap 'Directions to next' handoff to Google Maps.
- Tap-to-call and tap-to-text the customer directly from each appointment row.
- Time-clock for non-job kinds (drive / lunch / admin / training) — runs as a live timer in the header until they tap stop.
Offline mode (the moat feature)
When the tech's phone loses signal — basement, crawlspace, dead zone — the app keeps responding to taps. Status updates, time clock changes, and parts logs queue locally on the device using the browser's IndexedDB. The moment signal returns, queued actions sync to the server in order.
The status pill at the top of /portal/tech shows the current state — 'Offline · 2 queued' (amber) when there's no connection, 'Syncing · 1' (orange) while reconciling on reconnect, and hidden entirely when online with nothing pending.
Open /portal/tech, then put the phone in airplane mode. Tap an appointment's 'Mark on the way' button. You'll see the status pill flip to amber 'Offline · 1 queued' and the appointment card shows a 'Queued — will sync when online' banner. Turn airplane mode off; within 5 seconds the queue drains and the customer gets the on-the-way text.
Idempotency — no duplicate SMS to your customer
Each queued request carries an idempotency key. If the network blip happened to drop the response packet (the server actually got the request, but your phone never heard back), the replay arrives at the server, the dedup table catches it, and your customer gets exactly one 'Tech is on the way' text instead of two.
GPS tracking (separate, opt-in)
GPS is its own setting (Settings → GPS Tracking). Two-gate consent: the owner has to enable per-tech, AND the tech has to approve on first run. Most U.S. states require explicit employee consent for workplace GPS tracking even when the employer wants it — the two-gate design covers the legal angle. Tech mobile day-view works with or without GPS enabled.
iOS suspends Safari/PWA JavaScript the moment the user backgrounds the app, which means GPS pings don't continue when the phone is locked. For shops that need 8-hour-shift continuous tracking, the Capacitor-wrapped native iOS / Android app is on the roadmap. Web-app foreground tracking works on every other phone activity (browsing the dashboard, reading a text, leaving the screen on).
Anyone can preview the tech app by opening plyrium.com/demo/tech on a phone. Mock data, fully interactive, includes the offline-mode toggle. Useful for showing a tech the experience before they install it.