How to use chat and tasks on your phone

Chat and tasks are what the phone is for. This page covers using them there and the handful of places the phone behaves differently from a desk.

Chat on a phone

The channel list is the whole screen, and tapping a channel opens it with a Channels back link.

Everything important works: the conversation, the mention picker, entity chips, callback cards, the image viewer and the per-channel notification setting.

Three differences worth knowing.

Send with the button, not the keyboard. The on-screen return key inserts a line break, so the coral send button is how you post. That is deliberate, and it is why you never send half a message from a phone.

Formatting is a web feature. Bold text sent from the web reads as literal asterisks on the phone, so for anything the phone-carrying half of your team must read, plain sentences travel better than heavy formatting. See How to send and format a message.

Direct messages are web-only. To reach somebody who is on their phone, post in a channel and tag them, per How to tag people, tasks, documents and products.

The phone's channel list also shows a sender and snippet preview, including a note when a message is only photos, which the web sidebar does not.

You can record a decision from a message by long-pressing it, if you hold the permission for it. See How to record a decision.

Tasks on a phone

Your list, your inbox, task detail, creating a task, attachments, related records and reminders. Projects too, including creating a project or a cycle.

This is the phone's best feature, because a task reminder is genuinely useful away from a desk. A reminder buzzes as one of your assigned tasks nears its due date, and from the notification itself you can snooze it or complete the task without opening anything.

Snooze defaults to an hour and can be pushed out to a day.

Only tasks that are assigned to you, unfinished and carrying a due date produce reminders. See How to control task, stock and order alerts.

The analyst on a phone

The sparkle button raises it from any tab, and it keeps your place when you close and reopen it.

This is the one to actually use. Standing in a warehouse asking "what is about to run out that is also a strong seller" is a better use of a phone than any dashboard, and the digest cards and your saved prompts are all there. See What is the analyst?.

What is not on the phone?

Configuration and the back office, on purpose: admin Settings, Documents, Customers, Approvals, Purchase orders, Suppliers, Wholesale and custom Objects. Brief and Search show a coming-soon screen.

None of that is a gap to work around. It is the split described in Using Tideswell on your phone: the phone carries the conversation and the work, and the web carries the configuration.

When you need one of those, the website works on a phone browser too.

Does anything behave differently on permissions?

No. Every action goes through the same checks as the web, so what you can do at your desk is what you can do on your phone.

The Store tab disappears entirely if your workspace has the Store module switched off, and the record-a-decision option only appears if you hold that permission.