Install Dispatch on your phone

Last updated: October 2026

Start in the right place

On Android, start in Google Play and skip to the Android steps below. For an iPhone, or if you are adding it from Chrome on Android, the one thing that catches people out: install from app.dispatch.civildigital.co.uk, not from this site.

This page you are reading now is the marketing site. If you add it to your home screen you will get a smart-looking icon that opens a page about Dispatch rather than Dispatch itself, and you will reasonably conclude the app is broken. The app lives on its own address.

So: open that link on your phone, sign in, and wait until you can see your dashboard. Then follow the steps for your phone below. Adding it while you are signed in means the icon opens straight onto your jobs.

On an iPhone or iPad

Use Safari. This is not us being fussy: on iOS, Safari is the reliable route to a real home screen app, and other browsers may leave you with a shortcut that still opens in a tab.

1. Open app.dispatch.civildigital.co.uk in Safari and sign in.
2. Tap the Share button — the square with an arrow pointing up, at the bottom of the screen (or top right on an iPad).
3. Scroll down the list and tap Add to Home Screen.
4. The name will already say Dispatch. Tap Add, top right.

The icon appears on your home screen. Tap it and Dispatch opens full screen, without the Safari address bar and buttons.

If you cannot find Add to Home Screen in the share list, scroll further — on a busy iPhone it often sits below a long row of sharing options. You can also tap Edit Actions at the bottom of that list and pin it to the top for next time.

On an Android phone

Install the Dispatch app from Google Play.

1. Tap the badge above, or open Google Play on your phone and search for Dispatch.
2. Tap Install. It is a small download and takes a few seconds.
3. Open it and sign in. The icon sits on your home screen and in your app drawer like any other app.

If you would rather not use the store, Chrome can add Dispatch to your home screen instead: open app.dispatch.civildigital.co.uk in Chrome, sign in, tap the three dots menu, top right, and choose Install app (or Add to Home screen, depending on your version). Samsung Internet carries the same option under Add page to, then Home screen.

What actually changes once it is installed

Less than people expect, and that is the point. It is the same Dispatch, with the browser furniture taken away.

• It opens full screen. No address bar, no tabs, no accidental swipe back to whatever else you had open. On a phone screen that is a meaningful amount of space back.
• It stays signed in. Tap the icon and you are on your dashboard. You would only log in again if you sign yourself out, clear your browsing data, or an administrator removes your access.
• It keeps itself current. The home screen version is served fresh every time you open it, so there is nothing to update. The Android app updates through Google Play like any other app, and will ask you to update from the store on the rare occasion a version it needs is no longer supported.
• It sits with your other apps in the app drawer and in the app switcher, and it uses the Dispatch icon rather than a screenshot of a web page.

What it still needs a signal for

Dispatch needs a connection, installed or not. This is the honest limitation and it is worth knowing before you are stood in a basement plant room wondering why nothing is saving.

That is a deliberate design decision rather than an unfinished feature. An app that lets you work offline has to queue your changes on the phone and replay them later, and that queue is where the trouble lives: you complete a job at ten o'clock in a cellar, the office moves it at eleven, your phone finds signal at noon and quietly overwrites them. Two people are then confidently wrong about the same job. Dispatch would rather tell you plainly that it cannot save right now than pretend it has and sort it out behind your back.

In practice: fill the report in where you have a bar or two, or step outside to save. Photographs you have already taken are on your camera roll regardless, so nothing is lost by waiting.

A note for anyone with an operator or admin login

The installed app has no address bar, which means you cannot type a web address into it. Everything you need is reachable from the menus, so this only matters if somebody has sent you a link to paste. Open that in your normal browser instead, or use the bottom menu inside the app.

Removing it

Press and hold the icon and choose Remove on iPhone or Uninstall on Android, exactly as you would with any app.

Nothing is deleted from your account when you do. None of your business data lives on the phone — the app is a door, not a filing cabinet — so you can reinstall any time by repeating the steps above and find every job exactly where you left it.

Getting the team on it

If you are the one who bought Dispatch, this is the page to send round. Engineers who have it on the home screen open it several times a day; engineers who have to find it in a browser tend to ring the office instead, which is the phone call the software was meant to remove.

Once everyone is on it, syncing jobs to their calendar is the natural next step, and logging time against the job becomes something that happens on site rather than on Friday afternoon.