Using it on your phone

Grow Food Together runs in your phone’s browser, and it can live on your home screen like any other app. Once it is there it opens full screen, without the browser’s address bar, it can send you notifications, and the harvest form keeps working when you are out of signal at the far end of the garden.

There is nothing to download from an app store, and nothing about your account or your gardens changes. Everything you record lives with us, not on the phone, so removing the icon later takes nothing with it.

#Installing it

On Android, open the menu under your initials and choose Install app. Chrome asks you to confirm, and the icon joins your other apps. If the menu does not offer it, Chrome’s own menu has the same thing, as “Install app” or “Add to home screen”.

On iPhone and iPad, open Grow Food Together in Safari, tap the share button, and choose “Add to Home Screen”. Apple does not let a website offer this itself, which is why the menu’s Install app on an iPhone brings you to this page instead.

Signing in from the installed app ticks Remember me for you, and you then stay signed in for as long as you keep opening it. Signing out ends that on every device at once.

Press and hold the icon for two shortcuts: logging a harvest, and your gardens. With one garden, the harvest shortcut opens its form straight away; with more than one, it asks which garden first rather than guessing.

#Notifications on your phone

The notifications you see under the bell can also arrive on your phone, or on your computer, as they happen. They follow the choices you make in Notification settings — a kind of notification you have switched off there does not arrive anywhere.

Each device is turned on from that device. Open Notification settings on the phone and tap “Turn on notifications on this device”. Your phone then asks whether to allow them, and nothing is sent until you say yes. On iPhone and iPad this works only once Grow Food Together is on your home screen; in a Safari tab the page says so instead of offering the button.

Send notifications to my devices is the switch for all of them at once, if you want them off everywhere without visiting each device.

A run of notifications about the same thing — several people following your garden in a morning, say — arrives as one notice that updates, not a stack of them. If someone else signs in to Grow Food Together on your phone, it stops getting your notifications.

If you said no when your phone asked, the page tells you. Allowing them again is in your phone’s or browser’s settings for the site; nothing in Grow Food Together can undo that refusal for you.

#Logging a harvest without signal

A harvest you save with no connection is kept on the phone and sent when you are back online. Fill in the harvest form and save it as usual. Instead of the usual confirmation, a note at the top of the page says it is saved on this phone. Photos you added are kept with it, and the time recorded is the time you picked, not the time it reached us.

It sends itself the next time the app is open with signal; there is nothing to press. If it goes up twice — the connection dropped before we could answer the first time — it is recorded once.

Two things need a connection. The photo estimate does, which is why its button is greyed out while you are offline. So do pages you have not opened on this phone recently: your gardens, a garden’s page and its harvest form are kept from your last visit so they open without signal, and anything else shows a page saying you are offline.

If we could not save one — a crop removed from the garden while the harvest was waiting, for instance — the note says so, and Review lists what the harvest held, with a way to try again or discard it. Discarding asks twice, because that harvest exists nowhere else.

Signing out leaves unsent harvests on the phone, and they go up the next time you sign in there. Someone else signing in on the same phone never sends them as theirs.