Harvest Mobile v1.0.0

By Nithya Menon
April 12, 2021

Highlights

  • Harvest Mobile App launched
  • Stability improvements

Harvest Mobile App launched

From the very inception of Harvest, we knew we needed a mobile interface to capture and assist with work being done in the field. Most of 2020 was spent building the desktop web application so we built a temporary integration with a well established offline survey tool called Fulcrum. This enabled field agents to sign up households, link pods to households, and collect payments, without requiring us to make manual database changes every time something changed in the field. But because it wasn’t fully integrated into our backend, we were quite limited in terms of the information and features that could be offered to our customers.

By the end of 2020, we finally kicked off building our own app, using a PWA framework (progressive web application), and we’re very excited to announce this V1 release! Complete offline support was the most complex undertaking and resulted in us building our own API sooner than we thought we’d need to, but given the locations of our projects and how unreliable network connectivity can be, offline support was nonnegotiable.

This first version of our app includes:

  • Offline support, with syncing functionality
  • Local language support (Khmer, Tagalog)
  • Signup households
  • Link pods to households (installs, swapping pods, removing pods)
  • Collect payments
  • Lease appliances
  • Update user and installation details

Setup Harvest Mobile with your local language

Signup new households and designate their location + energy package

Manage Pods and households by simply scanning QR codes

Easily collect and track payments, and automatically top up each household’s energy credit

Manage appliance sales and financing for each household

Now with this core set of features released and a strong app foundation, we can continue adding features to support field maintenance and ultimately move towards a household facing interface in the future.

Stability improvements

Bug fixes in this release included:

  • Manually adjust/select location
  • Reset feature to help with pushing updates
  • Improve qr code scanning to work across more phones
  • Clean error handling to be more user friendly

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An engineering graduate from Harvey Mudd College, Nithya Menon has spent her career developing technology targeted towards empowering marginalized and developing communities world-wide. She has been pivotal in designing Okra's key power sharing algorithms, IoT firmware, and grid management software - and now drives the direction and strategy of Okra's technology as Product Development Lead.