The phone has its own App Settings screen, with four sections: Appearance, Site Check-In, Privacy and Offline Files. Almost none of it has an equivalent in the browser: there is no theme picker there, and nothing saved for offline use.
How to get there:
- Open the side menu (☰ in the top-left)
- Tap “App Settings” (sometimes shown as “Settings”)
- The four sections run down the screen in that order, with Offline Files at the bottom
Appearance (Light, Dark, or Automatic): At the top of App Settings you’ll see the Appearance section with three options:
- Light: always use the light theme
- Dark: always use the dark theme
- Automatic: follows your phone’s system setting (e.g., if your phone uses dark mode at night, the app does too)
Tap any option to switch. The change applies immediately. Appearance is mobile-only: the web app has a single theme and no appearance setting.
Site Check-In: The second section has nothing to switch: it says what checking in involves. Automatic check-in, which used to be switched on here, has been retired, and checking in yourself is the only way to be recorded on site.
- Three lines say what you do and what the phone keeps: you check in when you arrive and out when you leave, from the check-in bar on your Home screen; checking in needs location access for BuildersAI while you are using the app, and never in the background; and a check-in reads your location once to record how far from the site you were, never where you were
- “View my check-in history”: at the bottom of the section, this opens your own record of arrivals and departures
Location access is asked for in the check-in bar on Home, the first time you check in, and if it has been refused the bar takes you to the phone’s settings to allow it: see the “site_attendance” topic.
Privacy: One toggle, Analytics & Crash Reports, for anonymous usage data. The phone is the only place either app lets you change that answer once it has been given. See the “account” topic.
Offline downloads: The mobile app saves files, drawings and photos to your phone so you can view them with no signal. App Settings has an Offline Files section at the bottom:
- The summary: two figures, how many Files are saved and how much Storage Used they take
- Manage Downloads: this row only appears once you have downloaded something. Tap it to see every file saved offline, grouped by project:
- Each row shows the file name and size
- Swipe a row to the left and tap Remove, or tap the X at the end of the row, to free up space (the file stays available online, you just download it again next time you open it)
- Clear All Downloads: also only there once something is downloaded. Tap it to remove every offline file at once. Useful if your phone storage is full.
With nothing downloaded, the section just says “No files downloaded” and neither row is shown. Manage Downloads is reached from App Settings, not from the side menu.
Why is my phone storage full? Plans (PDFs) and photos are usually the biggest contributors. Use Manage Downloads to spot the largest files and remove the ones you no longer need offline.
Why is this mobile-only? The web app is online-only by design: it always pulls fresh data from the server, so there’s no offline cache to manage and no theme picker to keep in sync.
Two more things that are on the phone but not on this screen:
- Your Home cards, their order and which you see: on the Home screen, tap the sliders icon in the top-right. Drag a card by the handle on its right into the position you want, and switch a card off to hide it from Home (it stays in the list, dimmed, so you can switch it back on). Restore default puts the order back and shows every card again, and Done closes the sheet
- Updating the app: at the bottom of the side menu (☰) there is Update & Restart. Tap it and the app fetches the newest version and restarts. The version you are running is printed underneath
There is no language setting. The app is in English only, whatever language your phone is set to, and so is the web app.
Who can do what:
- Everything on App Settings is yours alone, on this phone. None of it changes anything for anybody else on the project