Phone sign-in and push notifications

Signing in with a phone number

Not every employee checks a work email address, and many do not have one. In mid-December we added phone number sign-in to Mintage Connect, so an employee can get into the app with the number their employer already has on file. It sits alongside the existing sign-in options rather than replacing them.

Notifications that lead somewhere

The main piece of work this month was push notifications. The app can now receive notifications from the platform, and tapping one opens the screen it is about rather than just the home page. When someone signs out, the phone is unregistered, so a shared or handed-down device does not keep receiving the previous person's alerts.

We also added crash reporting so that when the app misbehaves on a real phone, we hear about it and can fix it, rather than waiting for someone to describe the problem.

Smaller fixes

Lists that have nothing in them, such as a new employee's documents, now show a short message instead of an empty screen. Behind the scenes, colours were moved into shared constants and some code was tidied up, which makes later design changes simpler. It was a quiet month by commit count, but these were features employees would notice straight away. Phone sign-in in particular opens the app to staff who were never given an email address, which is common in many workplaces.