First Due Mobile

My understanding is this program was developed in part by some of the original developers from CrewSence and maybe a few other programs with the intention of being a "one stop shop". There is a learning curve and once that's achieved the system does what you need. That said as far as the "scheduler", for a dynamic department, it's a pain. The system is built off the premise of personnel staying on station assignments. Moving personnel long term, or finite changes are hard to achieve and some of the background programming can really mess up scheduling pre/post, specifically vacations/leave/trades, basically anything not associated w/ home shifts worked. We've had the program for 8-9 months and it's serving its purpose, albeit we're NOT using all the features, mainly scheduling and asset management. I have high hopes and FD's tech support has been great! Just know if you're used to CrewSense, the format and functionality are not the same...

App experience does not zoom to a correct resolution size (zooms in too far), hydrant icons on the responder view in the app are extremely small, but are appropriately sized in the web view. The developers have advised us that most of the app is just a “mirroring” of the web view, which causes mobile devices not to have a great experience. iPad’s do not tend to experience the resolution issues; this seems to be an iPhone issue. The support staff has advised our department not to use the app for the inspection side of the app. In the app, you need to learn how to manipulate the phone in order to get the app to function correctly (to complete or send an inspection, you need to rotate the phone 90° to have these buttons appear; when vertical, an empty pop appears). This makes our department loose a ton of the functionality of the app. The app continually drops users out of reports when uploading photos (only off of the initial start up of the report). The app leaves a lot to be desired, especially for the price of the overall software experience. I’ll be more than happy to update this when/if things change.

As a driver, I am really loving this app. As soon as the notification comes in I can quickly pull up the image of the incident and get a look at things like my water situation, FDC locations, and the structure itself. Helps me get a leg up on water and positioning and only takes a few seconds. If I’m heading out of the first due area it also lets me get a quick look at my first few turns, giving my officer some time to get settled and into the map books while I can already be heading down the road as soon as the crew jumps in. The only negative I have for the app is that there is no way to silence the alerts as they come in. I would love to keep the app running on my days off just to keep tabs on what incidents the other shifts are running but the notifications won’t silence and hearing the tones go off on my days off can get old. Even turning sounds off on my phone won’t stop the notification audio from going off. I have to turn off notifications completely in the app settings and then I can’t see what calls come in at all. Just add a no sound option in the tones list, please.