Frappe Helpdesk, now on Android
Frappe Helpdesk works perfectly well in a mobile browser; as long as you enjoy pinch-to-zoom.
We use Helpdesk at BWH for our support workflow, so I ended up building a native Android client for our
own use. It has reached the point where I figured it might be useful to others in the Frappe community too.
What it does
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Ticket list with filters and search
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Full ticket and conversation view
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Replies, comments, and canned responses
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Dashboard with ticket details and SLA status
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Analytics and agent leaderboard
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Push notifications
How it works with your Helpdesk site
The app uses the standard Frappe REST API, so there are no custom Helpdesk endpoints required.
A few parts turned out to be more interesting than expected:
Login
OAuth Authorization Code + PKCE is used for login, so the app never sees the user’s password and doesn’t ship a client secret. The OAuth Client ID is fetched from the site at runtime, so there’s nothing deployment-specific hardcoded into the app.
API key + secret authentication is still supported for sites where that’s preferred.
Push notifications
Frappe’s notification hooks run on the site that owns the ticket, so simply putting a relay somewhere else doesn’t work particularly well.
The solution is a small companion app called helpdesk_push, which mints the FCM v1 token directly on the bench. This means there’s no Cloudflare Worker or other third party sitting in the notification path.
Offline cache and counts
The app locally caches the newest few thousand tickets so lists open instantly and remain useful with an unreliable connection.
Counts, however, always come from the server. Our Helpdesk instance has around 61k tickets, and using locally cached data for things like total open or resolved counts would eventually give you numbers that quietly look correct but aren’t.
Agent attribution
Writes are performed as the agent selected in the app’s settings, so replies and comments don’t all end up being attributed to a single API user.
Try it
APK: Release v1.2.0 · bwhtech/helpdesk_mobile · GitHub
Source: bwhtech/helpdesk_mobile · GitHub
Push companion: kaulith/helpdesk-push · GitHub
One thing to know before installing: the account needs to be a System User.
Helpdesk blocks most API paths for website users, so an agent with only a portal login will hit Access not allowed for this URL during sign-in.
And yes, I discovered that the slow way.
What’s next?
Many more features, small enhancements, and an iOS app are also on my list.
Issues, feedback, and PRs are very welcome.
Curious to hear from the community: which Frappe apps do you wish had a good mobile client?
