You choose when the crew updates

A trail crew's phone is not a desk. It is out of signal for most of the day, halfway through a form when it finds a bar, and the only record of the work somebody has just done. An app that decides for itself when to install a new version on that phone is an app making a decision it has no business making.

So it does not any more. TrailsIQ's field app updates when somebody taps, and at no other time.

What actually changed

Three things, and the third is the one that took the work.

A new version is available the moment we ship it. Open the menu and there it is — no waiting for us to decide you are allowed to have it. Tap Update available, the app downloads the new version, checks that all of it arrived, and restarts on it. If the download does not finish, nothing changes: you keep the app you were using and can try again with better signal.

A new version installs itself on nobody. Your phone stays on the version it has until somebody taps. That was not true before — the app quietly refreshed itself in the background and booted the new version the next time you opened it, which meant a change we shipped on a Tuesday afternoon was on every phone in the field by Wednesday morning, offered to no one.

And we choose when your crew is told. When a version has been out long enough that we are confident in it, a notice appears at the top of the screen — once, for that version. Not on a schedule, and not every time we touch the code.

Why it works this way

We ship small changes often — several most weeks. That is good for fixing things and bad for interrupting people, and the two used to be the same event.

Now they are not. Every push is there for anybody who goes looking, which means a couple of people can take a new version the day it lands and use it on real ground. If something is wrong, we hear it from them, fix it, and the rest of the field never meets the problem. If nothing is wrong, we tell everyone.

That gap is the whole point. It is not caution for its own sake — it is the difference between one crew finding a bug and every crew finding it.

The app should never be the reason a morning goes sideways.

What you will see

Nothing, most of the time — and that is the change.

1. An "Update available" row in the menu. It is there whenever there is a newer version. Tap it when you have signal and a minute.

2. A notice at the top of the screen, occasionally. That is us saying a version is ready for everybody. Later puts it away for good on that phone; the menu row stays.

3. Very rarely, an update you have to take. If a version fixes something that matters, the notice says Update required and has no Later. This is deliberately rare — the point of everything above is that ordinary improvements do not interrupt anyone.

Offline work is untouched

None of this goes near your data. Downloaded trail packs, photographs, and anything queued while you were out of signal live separately from the app itself and survive an update — including an update that fails partway through.

If you want the detail, the field app's documentation covers updates, offline downloads and what happens when a save has nowhere to go.