The Bottify app on your phone

The phone answers and decides; the computer builds and configures — what the app does when you are away from your laptop, and what it honestly cannot do.

What does the Bottify mobile app do?

Bottify has two surfaces and they do not overlap by accident. The phone operates and responds. The web app builds and configures. Every screen in the app is one of three things: something a customer is waiting on, something waiting for your decision, or a number you want to check before you go to bed. Nothing in the app builds a bot, connects a channel, or invites a colleague. Those are laptop jobs, and the app says so on the screens where you would look for them.

A Thursday evening at عطور ريّان / Rayyan Perfumes, Riyadh. Nouf owns a four-person perfume shop on Salla — oud, gift sets, and an in-store gift-wrapping consultation customers can book. Sara works support. Khalid supervises the two evening staff. Nouf is at a family dinner with her laptop at home, and the shop is having its busiest hour.

1. Her phone buzzes: a customer's booking request is holding Saturday's 6 pm wrapping slot. She opens Approvals, reads the request, and presses Approve.
2. A conversation has been sitting nine minutes with nobody on it. She opens Inbox, presses Accept, and answers it herself.
3. A customer asks the price of a gift set she cannot remember. Catalog, search by name, read it off the screen.
4. A new box of oud arrives at the shop and Sara photographs it. Nouf adds it: Catalog → New product, then Take a photo.
5. The evening bot is answering a question wrongly. Bots → Pause. She will fix the wording on the laptop tomorrow.
6. Before bed she opens Abandoned carts and then Cart recovery, and reads that nothing has been sent to anybody.

That last line is not a bug and it is not her mistake. See Two things the app will not pretend about, below.

The tabs, and why yours may be shorter

An owner sees seven tabs, in this order: Inbox, Supervisor, Approvals, Bots, Catalog, Setup, Settings. The order is deliberate — answer, then decide, then look something up, then configure.

A tab your role cannot use is not there at all. It is not greyed out; it is absent. So a supervisor sees six tabs, a support agent sees three (Inbox, Catalog, Settings), and a viewer sees one (Settings). Tell your staff this before they call you. Sara's app is not broken and it is not a different version — her bar is short because three tabs are all her role can act on.

Two entry points that are not where you would look

• Abandoned carts sits under Catalog, on a card near the top of the screen, not under Settings.
• Cart recovery (the report) and Salla store sit under Settings, in a section headed Salla store.

One more thing about the screens themselves

Only the seven tabs put their name at the top of the screen. Every screen you reach by tapping a row shows a back control and nothing else at the top — the name of the screen is the heading it draws in its own body. If you are hunting for a screen title in the bar at the top, you will not find one.

Two things the app will not pretend about

WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger cannot be connected through Bottify yet. Meta has not approved Bottify. In the app's checklist this arrives as an explanation with no button — "WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger — awaiting platform approval", with the body "Meta must approve Bottify before your customers can message you on these channels." The phone stamps that row No action needed rather than To do, because there is genuinely nothing for you to do there. It shows for every workspace. You can still run WhatsApp today by bringing your own Meta app — that is a web job, and it has its own page. The phone has no screen for it at all.

Cart recovery records and counts; it does not send. The app says this before it shows you a single number: "Nothing is going out yet" — "Recovery is planned, not sent. Carts are recorded and reminders are worked out, but no message reaches a customer until your workspace turns sending on — so the recovered figures below are zero by design." Every figure that could be misread repeats the denial in its own label, so a screenshot cropped to one card is still honest. The button on a cart says Add to recovery list, never send.

What you still need a computer for

Verified absent from the app, not merely hidden: building or testing a flow, campaigns and sequences, WhatsApp templates, growth automations, webhooks, billing, team invitations, analytics, the template gallery, the knowledge base, branches, importing or exporting products, creating a bot, and connecting any channel. Do those on the laptop. The app is not apologising for this — it is telling you where the switch is.

Contacts and your team are now on the phone, and both sit behind a tab rather than beside one. The tab bar stops at seven, so neither got a tab of its own:

• Contacts opens from the Inbox tab. It is a read-only lookup, built for the question you ask with a customer waiting — who am I talking to? — not for reorganising your address book. Search runs when you submit, not on every keystroke, which is why "No contacts match this search." is true when you see it. A contact shows its channel, phone, email, First seen, whether it is Subscribed to messages or Unsubscribed from messages, and its Recent conversations. Admins, supervisors, agents and viewers can all open it; anyone else meets "Your account doesn't have access to contacts."
• Team opens from the Settings tab. It lists your teammates with their roles — Admin, Supervisor, Agent, Viewer — and offers the one urgent act a phone is right for: Deactivate, behind the confirm "Deactivate this teammate?" / "They lose access right away, and they disappear from this list." Only an admin can deactivate. Inviting somebody is still a laptop job.

What do you need before you can use the app?

You get the app from Bottify, not from a store. It runs on iPhone and Android, and it is not in the App Store or Google Play. Ask Bottify for the build for your workspace. A build that was not set up for your workspace will sign nobody in.

The app is light only. There is no dark mode.

Your account must already exist. Sign-in is your email and the same password you use on the web. The sign-in screen has exactly four things on it: the heading Sign in, Email, Password, and the button. There is no registration, no Forgot password? and no language switch. An account is created on the web, or by accepting an invitation there. If you have forgotten your password, reset it on the web first.

Before you sign in, the app follows your phone's language. The English / العربية choice lives in the Settings tab, which means you have to be signed in to reach it.

What your plan has to include. Holding the right role is not enough; some screens are also sold.

What your role lets you do. There is no hierarchy here — each line is exact.

One consequence worth knowing before your staff ask. Your support staff and supervisors cannot open the Archived screen. For them an archived product stops appearing, with no screen that explains where it went.

What are your options on the phone?

Everything here is optional and the app works with none of it changed.

Three things the app will warn you about, because they cannot be undone from the phone. Switching a service off ("It stops being bookable and disappears from this list — this app can't switch it back on."), saving a week of working hours ("Saving replaces this service's whole week — every day at once, not just the ones you changed."), and naming a booking question ("The bot stores each answer under this name. It can't be changed later.").

One small convenience worth knowing. Price and quantity fields accept Arabic-Indic numerals. Type ١٢٥٫٥ and the app records 125.5.

How do you use the Bottify app on your phone?

This is Nouf approving Saturday's wrapping slot from the family dinner.

1. Tap the notification. It says Someone is waiting on your decision and opens the booking itself, not the home screen. (If you have already cleared it: open the Approvals tab instead.)
2. Tap the Bookings segment.
3. Tap the row marked Awaiting your decision. The countdown beside it reads "42m left to decide"; if it has run out it reads "The hold has run out."
4. Read the request: Service, Reference, Appointment, Requested.
5. Tap Approve. (Or Hold as tentative if you want to think, or Decline to release the slot.)
6. If you tapped Decline, read the question first: "Decline this booking?" — "The seat is released and the slot re-opens for someone else. This can't be undone from here."
7. If you are declining, tap Yes, do it. To back out, tap Keep it.

Answering a waiting conversation

1. Open the Inbox tab.
2. Tap the Waiting segment. (The other one is Assigned to me.)
3. Tap the conversation.
4. Read the banner: "This conversation is waiting" — "Accept it to reply from your phone."
5. Tap Accept.
6. Type into the box marked Write a reply.
7. Tap Send.

Photographing a new product

1. Open the Catalog tab.
2. Tap New product.
3. Fill in Name, Description, Price and Currency.
4. Tap Save.
5. On the product that opens, tap Take a photo.
6. On Android, read "Use the camera?" and tap Continue. (On iPhone the same sentence is inside your phone's own dialog.)
7. Take the photo.
8. Tap Use as catalogue photo.

Pausing a bot until you are back at a laptop

1. Open the Bots tab.
2. Find the bot showing Live and tap Pause.
3. Read "Pause this bot?" — "Incoming messages stop being answered straight away. Customers who write in won't get a reply until you resume."
4. Tap Yes, do it.

Read the resume warning before you tap it tomorrow. Resume is not an undo. The dialog is exact: "Resume this bot?" — "This publishes today's saved version onto the channels the last release used — it does not restore the old version. Any flow changes made while paused go live now." If you edited the flow on your laptop while the bot was paused, this tap ships those edits.

How do you know the app is working?

A booking decision has no toast — the status word is the receipt. The button shows Working…, then the row's status changes to Approved (or Declined, or Held as tentative) and the countdown disappears. Nothing else happens. If you are waiting for a confirmation banner you will tap twice and be told "Someone already decided this one" by your own second tap.

An accepted conversation swaps its banner for a keyboard. The waiting banner is replaced by the reply box — Write a reply with Send beside it. A message you send shows Sending… and then settles. One that fails shows Not sent with Retry, and the bubble stays on screen; nothing you typed is lost.

A photo that made it shows a badge. You will see Sending your photo…, then the picture appears under Photos, and after Use as catalogue photo the thumbnail carries the Main badge. That badge is the confirmation.

A paused bot's chip flips to Paused. A resumed one flips back to Live.

A sync that started says so. Sync started — "Salla is being re-read now. This screen updates as it goes." If you tap it twice you get Already syncing — "A sync is running right now, so this one wasn't needed. Nothing went wrong — wait for it to finish." That second one is not an error.

A cart you added reads back honestly. The result is "Recovery is recorded for this cart." and the row then reads On the recovery list — not sent. That is the success state today. Nothing was sent, and the app will not tell you otherwise.

Empty is not the same as broken, and the app is careful to say so. "Nothing is waiting for a decision." · "Nothing here right now." · "Nobody is waiting." · "Nobody walked away" — "No checkout was started and left unfinished. There is nothing here to win back." That last one is good news dressed as an empty screen.

And the checklist finishes nothing on the phone, by design. Every actionable step's button reads "Continue on the web:" followed by that step's own title — "Continue on the web: Publish your bot" — and opens a browser. Some builds do not carry that link at all, and the row then reads "This step is finished on the web." with nothing to tap. The phone's checklist is a status board, not a wizard. It is also shared: "Your whole workspace shares this checklist."

Why can't I do this on the phone?

"Bottify has lost access to this store. Reconnect it on a computer before syncing."

Why. Your Salla authorisation expired or was withdrawn. Nothing is syncing, and Sync now will not start.

What to do. Nothing on the phone will fix this, and the app does not pretend otherwise — it names the computer instead of offering you a retry that would fail. Open Bottify on a laptop and reconnect the store. Your catalog keeps whatever the last finished sync left in it, so the shop is not empty in the meantime.

The same shape of problem appears on a bot's channels: "Access token expired — reconnect it in the web app", "Needs reconnecting in the web app", and "Messages aren't arriving — webhook is failing". All three are the phone showing you a fault it cannot repair. Read it here, fix it there.

"This photo wasn't accepted" — "That photo is too small. It needs to be at least 500×500 pixels."

Why. The picture is under 500 pixels on one side. The other one you will meet is its sibling, "That photo is larger than 8 MB. Take a new one and it will be resized for you."

What to do. For the small one, retake it — take the picture with your phone's camera rather than pulling a thumbnail off a chat or a website, and it will be large enough. For the large one, the sentence means what it says: take a new one and the app handles the size. The camera never crops your photo, so a tall bottle stays a tall bottle.

"Permission is turned off" — "Bottify can't open the camera because that permission is turned off. You can turn it back on in the system Settings app."

Why. You said no to the camera twice on an Android phone. After the second refusal your phone stops asking, permanently. Nothing in Bottify can bring that question back.

What to do. Open your phone's own Settings app, find Bottify, and turn the camera permission back on. Then return to the product and tap Take a photo again. Until you do, Choose a photo and Add by link still work — you have lost the camera, not the ability to add pictures.

Two more you will meet, with less drama. "Someone already decided this one — it's now Approved." means a colleague got to that booking from their own phone first; nothing is broken and no decision was lost. And "Couldn't sign you in. Check your email and password." is the app's only sign-in error — it deliberately never tells you which half was wrong, so check both, and reset the password on the web if you need to.

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