- Logistics
- Mobile App Development
- Custom App Development
- DevOps
A driver app that works in the loading bay
Delivery software is written in an office with good signal and used in basements, warehouses and rural dead zones. Building offline first means a driver records a delivery where it happened, and the office sees it the moment there is signal again.
Representative engagement. This describes a pattern we build rather than one named client: the situation that produces it, how we approach it, and the range of outcomes that kind of work lands in. Figures are stated as ranges or targets, never as a measured result for a specific customer. Our named client work is on the work index.
- Industry
- Logistics
- deliveries recorded with no signal, synced when there is
- Offline first
- load status, driver and exceptions in one view
- 1 screen
The problem
An app that needs connectivity to record a delivery records nothing in the places drivers spend their day. Proof of delivery gets captured later from memory, or on paper, or not at all, and a disputed delivery with no signature is a cost the business absorbs. Retrofitting offline support is close to a rewrite, because it changes what a write means. Two drivers, two devices and a delayed sync produce conflicting updates that a naive last write wins strategy resolves by silently losing one. Meanwhile dispatch is answering the phone. Where is it, has it gone out, who has it, all of which is knowable and none of which is in one place.
What we built
Local first storage on the device, with every action queued and reconciled when connectivity returns. Signatures, photographs and status changes are captured against the record they belong to and carry the time and place they were taken, not the time they eventually uploaded. Conflicts are resolved by rule rather than by timestamp, because the rules are knowable: a delivery cannot un-deliver, a later exception supersedes an earlier one, and anything genuinely ambiguous is surfaced to a human rather than resolved quietly. Dispatch gets one screen showing every load, its status and its exceptions, fed by the same data. Customers get tracking they can check themselves, which is the cheapest reduction in inbound calls available anywhere in this business.
What changed
Proof of delivery is captured at the door rather than reconstructed at the depot, which is the difference between winning and absorbing a disputed delivery. Dispatch stops being a switchboard. The question that used to take three phone calls is answered on one screen, and a good share of it is answered by the customer without calling at all.
Built with
- React Native
- Expo
- SQLite
- Node.js
- PostgreSQL