Your crew should open your app, not a vendor’s.
The app on your super's phone every morning carries someone's logo. Why it should be yours, what the field actually needs from it, and four questions for any field app.
Look at your superintendent’s phone at 7am. The app they open to log the day has a logo on it. It is almost never yours.
It is the software vendor’s. Same icon on the phone of every super at every other builder in town who rents the same tool. Your name is somewhere inside, on a project list, under theirs.
Most builders have never thought about it, because until recently there was no other option. A custom app was a six-figure project for a firm with a development team. That changed, and it is worth thinking about now.
Why the icon matters
It sounds cosmetic. It is not, for three reasons.
- It is the tool your crew learns, not the vendor’s. When a firm changes PM software, the field feels it first. New app, new buttons, new login, three weeks of supers texting photos to the office because they cannot find the upload. If the app is yours, you can change what runs behind it without retraining the field.
- It is what your people and your trades see every day. A super who opens an app with your name on it every morning is working inside your firm, not inside a vendor’s product. For a builder trying to keep good people, that is not nothing.
- It does not leave when a vendor does. A vendor’s app goes wherever the vendor goes: a rebrand, an acquisition, a product shut down. CoConstruct customers are retraining their field crews on a different app this year for exactly that reason.
What the field actually needs from it
The office wants every feature on the phone. The field does not. A super on a slab pour with gloves on needs four things, fast:
The test is not how many features the app has. It is whether a log entered on site at 4pm is on the project, in front of the PM and visible to the homeowner, without anyone touching it again. If the office has to re-enter anything from the field, the app is a camera with extra steps.
How it works in Yglu
Every Yglu install includes the firm’s own mobile app, with the firm’s name and logo on the home screen. Supers capture daily logs, photos and punch items and check the schedule from it. Whatever they save lands on the project the moment it is saved, in the same system as the CRM, the homeowner portal and the books. Nothing is retyped.
Two honest limits. It also runs in a normal mobile browser, which is how anyone who has not installed it gets in. And there is no full offline mode today. If your crews work sites with no signal at all, tell us on the fit visit and we will scope what field capture needs to look like for you.
Four questions for any field app
Hand the phone to your best super during the demo and let them answer the last one. They will tell you more in five minutes than the sales deck will. We wrote about the rest of the stack in your firm runs on six rented systems.
Written by Kol Dorney, founder of Yglu. Field Notes drops when there is something worth putting on the record, not on a publishing schedule.