Working with no signal
Last updated October 03, 2026
When the crew app has no signal it keeps working: timers, item completions and notes are stored on the device with the time they actually happened and sent automatically the moment the connection returns.
On most of the water where dock work happens the bars go at the first narrows and come back on the way home. LakeOps treats that as normal, not as a problem.
The idea underneath it
The device is where work is recorded. The network is an occasional opportunity to tell the office about it. Everything else follows from taking that literally.
So there is no “save” that can fail. A tap is written to the phone with the time it happened, and the phone sends it when it can. The crew sees a count of what is still waiting; they do not have to do anything about it.
What survives a dead zone
| Works offline | Waits for signal |
|---|---|
| Reading the whole day from the day pack | Photo uploads |
| Starting and stopping the clock | Photography for water the device has not drawn recently |
| Marking items done and skipping them | Anything on the office screens |
| Writing notes and correcting a pin |
A resend is never a double
A boat coming back into range sends everything it has been holding, and a marginal connection may send some of it twice. Tap it once with a wet glove and it counts once — no matter how many times the phone has to send it. One tap, one timer, one completion, one customer email.
Order is the order the work happened
Taps can arrive out of order — a timer's stop can easily show up ahead of its start. LakeOps puts everything back in the order the work actually happened, and a stop that shows up before its start waits for it rather than being thrown away.
Who wins when two people did different things
The office marks a job complete at the desk while a crew member marks an item done on the water. Both are legitimate. The rules are decided in advance and they are short:
- LakeOps never un-completes work. A completion, once recorded, stands.
- An office edit beats a field edit on the same field.
- Between two device edits, the later one wins. Two corrections of the same pin made one after the other from the boat both land, in order, so the pin ends where it was put last.
- Completing a stop from a phone stops the clocks that were running when it was completed. A clock somebody started afterwards on another phone keeps running, so their minutes are kept.
- A phone whose clock is wrong does not get to rewrite the day — its times are trusted only to within a quarter hour.
The boat and the office follow the same rules
A completion sent in late from a boat is handled exactly like a completion clicked in the office — same rules, same arithmetic, no separate machinery that could drift out of step. If they were handled differently, the differences would surface in the field, months later, in an argument about a bill.
Permissions still apply
Everything a phone sends in is checked against the person’s role when it lands, not just when the button was shown. Someone whose role cannot run timers cannot get a timer in through the back door by being offline.
When the server turns away everything a phone sends, or a photo, because of the person’s role, that is treated as not now, not never. It almost always means the office changed somebody’s role during the day, so the phone keeps the work, says Your role can’t send this right now — ask the office, and tries again a few minutes later. Once the role is put right, everything it was holding lands, timestamped when it happened.
A single piece of work the role was never allowed to do is different. A role that can only run the clock still sends its clock, but anything else it recorded is refused on its own and is not tried again. It is kept on the server as a failed field write, where the office can see it and retry it once the role allows, or discard it.
What to actually tell a crew
- Pull the day pack before you leave.
- Work normally. Do not wait for bars and do not batch it up at the end of the day.
- Photograph the work where the work is. The picture is kept on the phone and goes up with everything else when you are back in range — the badge counts it until it does.
- Do not force-quit the app to “make it sync”. It sends on its own.
The reasoning behind all of this is on the crew app page.
Still stuck? Ask us — or go back to the help center.