On your phone

Else works on a phone browser, and it can be installed to your home screen so it opens like an app. There is no iOS or Android app — nothing to find in the App Store or on Google Play, and nothing coming that this page can promise you. The installed version is the web app, saved to your home screen.

Two things follow from that, and they are the two worth knowing before you rely on your phone: it will not notify you, and long work does not need you to keep the tab open.

Installing it

Open elsedoes.com/home in your phone browser and use the browser’s own menu — Add to Home Screen on iOS Safari, Install app or Add to Home screen in Chrome. Else supplies everything the browser needs for that: the app installs under its own name and icon, opens without browser chrome, and starts on your home screen.

Two caveats, both real:

• Else does not prompt you to install. There is no banner and no “install” button anywhere in the app. If you do not go looking in the browser menu, nothing will suggest it.
• Install from /home, not from the marketing homepage. The front page of the site and the app are served separately, and only the app offers itself for installing. If the option is greyed out or absent, you are on the wrong page — navigate into the app first.

What the layout does differently

The sidebar becomes a bar across the bottom of the screen with five destinations: Home, Chats, Tasks, Assistants and Apps. Chats is mobile-only — it slides your conversation history up as a sheet rather than sending you to a screen. Wallet, Settings and Sign out move into the menu behind your avatar, at the right-hand end of the bar.

Elsewhere, panels that are side-by-side on a desktop become things that slide up from the bottom: the run panel above the composer, the engine picker, and the results desk. On a small phone the desk takes the whole screen rather than sitting beside the conversation. Settings turns into a two-level list — pick a section, then come back — instead of the rail-and-pane layout.

The bar sits above the home indicator on a notched phone rather than under it, and text fields are sized so that focusing one does not zoom the page.

Attaching things from a phone

The attach button opens your phone’s own picker, and because Else accepts images, that picker offers your camera and photo library alongside your files. There is no camera-only shortcut — you go through the standard sheet. The same limits apply as anywhere else; see Limits and Giving it materials.

What it will not do on a phone

It will not notify you. Else has no push notifications — not on iOS, not on Android, not in an installed web app. When a run needs your approval or finishes, nothing appears on your lock screen, and nothing arrives while the app is closed. The only mail Else sends you today is your sign-in code.

The consequence for handed-off work: come back and look. A task that stops to check with you waits indefinitely and costs nothing while it waits, so nothing is lost by checking in an hour rather than in a minute — but nothing will tell you either. See When it checks with you.

It does not work offline. Enough of the app is cached that a saved home-screen icon will open and show its shell without a connection, but every conversation, task and receipt comes from the network. There is no offline mode, no queued sending, and no banner telling you that you have dropped off the network — a request made with no connection simply fails.

There are no touch gestures. No swipe-to-go-back inside the app, no pull-to-refresh. Use the bottom bar and the back controls in the interface.

The short version

Install it from /home, use the bottom bar, attach from your camera roll — and treat your phone as a place to start work and collect results, not as a place that will tap you on the shoulder. Handing a job off and coming back to it is the pattern the product is actually built around; see Your first task.