Unit App, Dispatch App and Push-To-Talk Update

We are nearing the end of 2021 and wanted to give a status update on the new Unit App (version 6), Dispatch App and Push-To-Talk system. All 3 projects are moving along nicely. We are feature complete on the Dispatch App but needed to update the Unit App to finalize the Push-To-Talk system between the 2 apps. This required us to put the Dispatch app on hold while we get the v6 Unit App update out, frustrating I know as were so close on the Dispatch app, but we need a companion app for Push-To-Talk and the Unit app had the most pending todo items.

Unfortunately we encountered a 2 week delay in the Unit app work. This was due to us needing to upgrade our build infrastructure to facilitate building of the Unit iOS app. To build apps that will install on Apple devices we are required to build those apps on Apple Mac hardware. We had an old Mac Mini that was doing our builds but the build time was very long, over 30 minutes. The new Unit app is using the latest SDK from Apple and required a number of software updates, so we went out a bought a new Mac Mini (which had the new M1 chip) and ran into issues. So we bought another last gen Mac Mini with an Intel chip and got that working.

Our build times are now 10 minutes for the Intel i7 Mac Mini and 9 minutes 30 seconds for the M1 Mac Mini. Now that we are getting the iOS and Android apps built for the Unit app update we are moving to on-device testing. We are hoping to have that done within the next couple of weeks and start at least a Beta rollout to the Google Play store for Android. The iOS update will follow at a latter time, to allow us to validate Android is working correctly.

When the new Unit app hits the Google Play store we will be finalizing the Dispatch App and rolling that out to production. Both the v6 Unit App and Dispatch App will form the apps used to launch Push-To-Talk and at that point we will enable customers interesting in testing that feature before we make it available to purchase.

Thank you all for your patience. We’ve been doing a lot of work updating our application architecture, frameworks and tooling to allow us to move quicker on feature requests and enhancements. But before we can run, we need to crawl and walk (the backend framework and infrastructure work). Our goal is to hit 2022 running to give you all bug fixes, new features and enhancements are our normal quick pace.