Resgrid’s NextGen Apps

The last year and a half have been extremely busy. In a future update I’ll update you all on some other very cool work being done behind the scenes and also some really cool things Resgrid is working toward. But today we hae to talk about the state of the Resgrid Responder and Unit apps; also including BigBoard and Dispatch.

The original Resgrid Responder app was nativly written for both iOS and Android. As the app started to scale with new features and updates it came to the point where a small team of a couple developers couldn’t keep updating it and the rest of the suite. So the decision was made to migrate to Ionic and Capacitor. This allowed us to developer faster for both platforms and gave us a huge amount of re-use between the apps and our main Web app. But when we introduced Push-To-Talk we ran into a wall. The goal of our PTT would be that you could use a low-cost Bluetooh handset, put your phone in your pocket and utilize the radio, just like standard walkie-talkie’s. But because of the nature of the app, when the app was backgrounded (or the lock screen turned on) the app would stop responding. To work around this, the PTT module was re-coded native for iOS and Android, but now the code-base had web and native components and issues kept cropping up, so we turned PTT off suite wide and stop sales of it.

That brings us to today; as of today I’ve merged into our main branch for the Responder app the new React Native codebase. This is a complete departure from what we’ve done in the past, but it solves a number of our issues; better native functionality support, vibrant ecosystem of 3rd tools and components, large base of developers. All of this while still being a single code base we can use to generate Android, iOS and even Web applications (and hopefully Windows and MacOS ones too). 

This won’t be a bump free change, this was a massive re-write with almost no code able to be re-used. So there will be things that were missed or not fully tested. But the foundation here sets us up for the next 5+ years giving us the capiblities to deliver new features like Push-To-Talk that we were limited to in the past. 

By the end of August I expect at least the Unit and Responder apps to be updated in the Google Play stores for Android with iOS on Apple not far behind. We start with Android first as it’s quicker to get changes pushed out on that platform. Expect frequent updates into September for both apps while errors and bugs are getting fixed. After both apps are stable work will begin on the BigBoard and Dispatch apps as well to bring them in-line.