How updates reach your tills

Nothing updates under your hands

A new version never takes over a till mid-service. It downloads in the background, then waits, and the only thing that applies it is somebody tapping the restart offer. There is no automatic restart at day end and no forced upgrade during a shift.

That is deliberate. Restarting throws away everything the page was holding, so it is treated as an action with a cost rather than as housekeeping.

Finding out there is one

The app asks whether a new version exists at most every fifteen minutes, and only when the tab is visible and on a working link. A hidden tab does not spend a tablet's battery or a kitchen's tethered data asking, and an offline till would only be queueing a request that is certain to fail.

Once a new version has been found and is waiting, it stops asking. There is nothing left to discover.

When the restart offer appears

The offer is shown only when a restart could not cost you anything. Every one of these has to be true:

• a new version is genuinely waiting,
• the link is confirmed working,
• nothing is queued waiting to sync,
• nothing needs attention in the queue,
• your session has not expired,
• no print job is running.

It is re-checked continuously, not once. The offer disappears the moment a sale is queued or a print starts, and comes back the moment the queue is clear again. If you cannot see it and you expected to, one of those six is the reason — and the sync pill will normally tell you which.

What happens when you tap it

The waiting version takes over and the page reloads once. Exactly once: a double tap, a slow takeover and the safety timer all collapse into a single reload, and a till that has just restarted refuses to restart again for a few seconds.

If the takeover does not happen for any reason, the app reloads anyway after a moment rather than leaving you with a button that does nothing.

Your queue is untouched by a restart. Anything waiting to sync is stored on the device, not in the page.

Other windows on the same device

When you apply an update, other open windows of the app are told. They do not restart blindly:

• A window that is idle — nothing queued, nothing to fix, nothing printing, nothing half-typed — reloads itself so every window is running the same version.
• A window that is busy, or that is the one currently on screen, is left alone and keeps its own restart offer instead. A cashier mid-order is never yanked out of it by something that happened in another window.

There is one update offer, and this is it

There is no separate desktop app to keep up to date. Your tills run the app in a browser, so the restart offer above is the only update affordance anywhere in the product — deliberately. A till asked to update twice for one release would rightly distrust both prompts.

If a downloadable terminal ever ships, it will be described here before you are asked to install it.

Seeing what changed

The What's new page is a plain, hand-written changelog of things an owner would notice. Being hand-written is the cost of it being readable — if something shipped and is not listed there, the list is behind, not the product.