Work crews · site, trade, warehouse, venue
Walkie-talkie app for work crews
Your crew already carries the hardware. What they don't have is a channel. A walkie-talkie app turns the phones already in their pockets into one shared voice channel — no handsets to buy, charge, licence or lose at the end of a job.
The honest limit, stated up front.
CRAGGEN needs mobile data or Wi-Fi on every phone on the channel. It is not a radio, it cannot bridge a dead zone, and it cannot call the emergency services — in an emergency dial 999. If your site genuinely has no coverage, buy PMR446 handsets instead; we would rather tell you that than sell you something that fails on the first shift. Satellite-to-cell may change this in time, and we track it honestly on the satellite-to-cell status page — CRAGGEN's own row reads "not yet" on every carrier.
Does a walkie-talkie app work in the background?
Yes — CRAGGEN is designed to stay on the channel with the screen off and the phone in a pocket, and an Android notification shows the service is running. That is the whole feature, not a setting you have to go and find: the phone goes in the hi-vis pocket, the screen goes black, and a voice still comes out of it.
This is the question crews actually search for, and it is the one most chat apps answer badly. A message you have to unlock a phone to read is not background communication.
Which work teams is it for?
Site and trade crews
Groundworks, fit-out, install teams — spread across a building with one channel between them.
Warehouse and yard
Pickers, loaders and forklift banksmen coordinating without shouting across a bay.
Events and production
Build, show and derig: runners, riggers and stage crew who move faster than a group chat.
Retail and hospitality floors
Floor staff, kitchen pass and duty managers, where a radio on the hip looks wrong to customers.
Facilities and cleaning
Teams spread over several floors or several buildings, on ordinary mobile data.
Volunteer and church teams
Setup crews and welcome teams who change every week and cannot administer accounts.
Why not just buy two-way radios?
Buy radios when the site has no mobile coverage, when you need them to work in a power cut, or when the crew never leaves a small fixed area — otherwise the phones already in their pockets cost nothing extra and reach across a whole town.
| PMR446 two-way radio | Push-to-talk app | |
|---|---|---|
| Works with no mobile signal | Yes — this is the reason to buy one | No |
| Range | Limited, and buildings cut it hard | Anywhere each phone has data |
| Hardware to buy and charge | One handset per person | None — they carry it already |
| New starter joins | Hand them a spare, if there is one | Read out a four-word code |
| Licence needed in the UK | No, for PMR446 — see the licence page | No — it is data, not radio |
Plenty of teams end up running both, and that is a sensible answer rather than a failure of either.
How does a crew actually set it up?
One person creates a private channel, adds an optional PIN, and reads the four-word code out at the morning briefing — that is the entire rollout, and it does not require anyone to create an account.
Joining is always free, so only the host is on a paid tier. Free hosts a channel for up to six people. Pro raises the headcount, supports a compatible physical push-to-talk button so the phone can stay packed, and can replay the last message that phone received. Crew raises it further and lets a supervisor monitor several channels at once — a duty manager listening to front-of-house and back-of-house together. Google Play shows current subscription prices.
Is anything recorded?
No — voice is relayed live and never stored on CRAGGEN's servers, so there is no transcript, no history and no admin playback. Pro and Crew replay holds only the last received message in that phone's own memory; it is not uploaded to us and it is not a recording of the channel.
Screen off. Still on the channel.
Hold to talk, release to listen, phone in the pocket the rest of the shift.
No account · no tracking in the app · no server audio recording · joining is always free