Up to version 5, the settings held two switches nobody really needed: light or dark, and a color theme to pick from. Both were questions put to the user. Questions about taste — answered once, identical from then on. Whether you were locked or not made no difference to what you saw.
With version 6, "Signal Colours", both switches are gone. Not because settings are bad, but because these two were spending something the app can put to better use. Color is no longer a preference here. It is a readout.
Green means locked, pink means open
The rule is short enough that you never have to look it up:
- Green — the wearer is locked.
- Pink — the wearer is not locked.
- Indigo — the keyholder area.
All three are dark worlds; this was never about light versus dark, only about which of the three currently applies. The color is not a dot in a corner, it is the whole surface: background, panels, accents, buttons. Pull the phone out of your pocket and you know where you stand before you have read a single word.
That is the real gain. A status line has to be read and understood. A surface is simply seen. The tracker always showed the state — now you no longer have to go looking for it.
Pink also means: cleaning break
The color answers exactly one question, and that question is about now. It does not answer why. Open for cleaning? Pink — even in the middle of an inspection request. Open because of a health pause? Also pink. A permitted break is still an opening.
That severity is deliberate. It would have been easy to give the legitimate pause a third, friendlier color — and that is precisely how the color would have lost its meaning. A display that distinguishes between "open" and "open, but it's fine" has stopped reporting a state and started reporting a judgement. The reason for the opening is still spelled out on the card, along with the time remaining and the button to lock back up. The color stays out of it.
The world changes mid-session
The switch is not a restart, and it is not a theme change buried in settings. It happens while you are looking at it. Unlock and log the entry, and you watch the app turn pink. Lock back up, and you watch it turn green.
That was the point where a color idea turned into a feature. In this tool, a state rarely changes in passing — every opening and every locking is a deliberate act, usually one with an agreement behind it. Having the whole environment perform that act with you gives it a weight no line of text can carry. You are no longer telling the app something for it to record. You are changing it.
Indigo: the third world
The keyholder area is indigo, regardless of your own state. That settles a problem that used to come up constantly: anyone who both wears a device and holds keys had to work out from the content which area they were in. Now they can tell from the room they are standing in.
Inside indigo, each sub's row carries that sub's state as an accent. Open the overview and you can see who is locked and who is not without expanding a single card. With one person that is a convenience. With several it is the difference between a list you work through and a picture you take in.
A lock you can read by its shape
Color alone would not be enough. Roughly eight percent of men do not see red and green the way this mapping assumes, and in bright daylight nobody reads color nuance anyway. So v6 ships its own pair of lock symbols that differ in shape, not just in tone: closed shackle against open shackle, distinguishable at a glance in greyscale, at small sizes, and at an angle.
It is the least spectacular part of this release and the part that took the longest to draw. A status display that only works through color is not a status display; it is decoration with a failure mode. Color and shape now say the same thing, independently of each other.
Icons that mean the device
Alongside that, the wear categories got proper icons: plug, cuffs, ring, gag. Until now they ran under generic placeholders — a symbol that can mean anything means nothing. If you track several categories in parallel, lists, calendars and inspection requests now tell you what they are about by their icon instead of by their label.
Fewer boxes
The interface lost its frames at the same time. Every piece of information used to sit in its own box with a border, a shadow and padding — tidy with two cards, a patchwork with twelve, where everything looks equally important.
v6 places the blocks in one continuous grid instead. Spacing and alignment do the ordering, not outlines. What matters right now sits at the top and is allowed to take up room; what is reference material settles below. The dashboard still answers the same question it always did — what needs doing now — you just no longer have to look through a dozen edges to find the answer.
One word per thing
The invisible part of v6 is the vocabulary. Grown over years, the same thing went by different names in three places, depending on when that area was built. To the person who built it, those are synonyms. To the person seeing it for the first time, they are three different things.
v6 cleans that up: one term per thing, in the interface and in the notifications. It is the kind of change nobody notices when it works.
The lock on your lock screen
The native iOS app adds one more thing: a lock screen display showing the lock, in the wearer's state and color. A glance at a phone that is not even awake, without unlocking, without opening anything.
Two honest caveats. First, this is the native app, not the installed web app — the PWA remains the regular route on any device and does not get the lock screen. Second, because of the content, the native apps are not distributed through the stores: iOS as a test build, Android as an install file, both on request via the feedback button on this site. Skip it and you lose nothing except that one display.
What the color cannot do
An interface that announces your state across its whole surface is also legible to anyone who happens to glance at the screen. That is the price of working without reading, and it is worth paying deliberately. If you open the app on a train, know that the surface is saying something. It is not saying it in words, and without knowing the rule pink is just a color — but it is there.
And the color shows what has been recorded, not what is. The tracker documents; it does not measure. Skip logging an opening and you will still see green — the display is not wrong, it is exactly as right as the input was. v6 does not change that and is not meant to: commitment here does not come from technical impossibility, it comes from two adults having agreed on something and both being able to see what applies. All v6 does is make the second half of that faster.
How to get v6
How version 6 reaches your instance, what else is in it, and what the portal explicitly is not: all of that is in the release announcement.
A full overview of the features lives on the features page.