rallyHelp

Chapter 8 · Rally outside the app / 8.6

Rally on your iPhone

Follow and join your Channels from your phone: read, reply, branch, dictate and chat with Sidekicks.

The Rally app for iPhone (it runs on iPad too) puts your Channels in your pocket. It is a companion to the Mac app rather than a copy, made for following work and joining in: checking how a job is going, answering a question Rally asked you, replying to a mention, or sending a quick request while you are away from your desk. Setting things up stays on the Mac, and the next page lists exactly what that covers.

Everything you do on the phone happens in the same Channels your teammates see on their Macs. Reply from the bus, and the reply is there when they look.

Getting started

The iPhone app needs iOS 26 or newer. If you would like it and do not have it yet, ask the Rally team at help@rallywith.ai.

  1. Open the app. Three short cards introduce it; tap Next through them and then Get started.
  2. Tap Continue with Google and sign in with the same Google account you use on your Mac. The iPhone app signs in with Google only.
  3. If you belong to one Organization, it opens straight away. If you belong to several, or have invitations waiting, you see the Organizations screen first.

The Organizations screen

  • Your organizations lists each Organization with its region. Tap one to open it.
  • Invitations shows invitations waiting for you, with who sent them. Accept one to join.
  • Create an organization lets you start a new one. Type a name and tap Create. The screen also has a Region menu offering United States and European Union. Leave it on United States: Rally runs one deployment (see Where your data lives), and an Organization created with European Union chosen is refused. The menu is left over from an earlier version of the app.

The phone holds one Organization at a time. To get to a different one, come back to this screen. The guided setup you met on the Mac in chapter 1 does not run on the iPhone.

The Channels tab

The first tab lists your Channels, grouped by when you last opened them: Last hour, Today, Yesterday, This week, This month and Before this month. A Channel with something new has an unread dot, a preview of the latest message and its time.

  • Pull down to refresh. Scroll to the bottom and older Channels load by themselves.
  • Swipe a row to the left for Archive and Unread.
  • Press and hold a row for Rename, Make private or Make public to organization, Mark unread and Archive.
  • The round avatar at the top left, with your initials and colour, opens Settings.

The order is by when you last looked, not by the latest message. The phone also has no Spaces, so there is no pinned section and Mac pins do not show here. And there is no button to start a new Channel: new Channels begin on the Mac, or in Slack.

Inside a Channel

Tapping a Channel shows its Main conversation, each of your Breakouts, and a New breakout row. Tap Main or a Breakout to open the conversation.

What you see will be familiar from While Rally works:

  • Rally's replies appear as it writes them.
  • The steps it took fold into a Worked list above the answer.
  • When Rally has a question for you, it shows a question card with Skip and Submit.
  • If a turn failed, a Retry button sits under it.
  • An Unread divider marks where you stopped reading. In a long conversation a down-arrow button, Jump to latest, takes you to the bottom. Scroll to the top and older messages load by themselves.

The info button at the top right opens Details: the Channel's title, its email address, whether it is public or private, and the people in it.

Press and hold Main or a Breakout in the list for Rename, Copy channel link or Copy breakout link, and Archive. On Main you can also choose Make public to organization.

Note

If your connection drops, the app does not save messages to send later. It tells you something went wrong; send again once you have signal and it reconnects.

Starting a Breakout

Under any finished message in Main, tap the branch arrow (New breakout). Or tap New breakout in the Channel's list. A New breakout screen opens, and your first message creates the Breakout. Until you send that first message, nothing exists, so backing out costs nothing. When you branch from a message, that message and the ones before it come along, faded, as context.

You can only branch from Main, not from inside another Breakout. A Breakout is private to whoever started it, and who is in it cannot be changed from the phone.

Writing to Rally

The message bar at the bottom says Ask Rally anything.

  • Type and press Return to send.
  • To attach a photo, tap the paperclip and choose one from your library.
  • To attach any other file, press and hold the paperclip and choose Choose file. This one is easy to miss. Attachments show as chips above the bar, each with an × to remove it, and a message with an attachment can be sent without any text.
  • To talk instead of type, tap the waveform button. A Speak sheet opens and shows Listening while you talk; tap Send to send what you said straight away, or Cancel.
  • While Rally is writing, the send button turns into a square. Tap it to stop.

Voice on the iPhone uses Apple's own speech recognition, which needs permission for both the microphone and speech recognition. If either is turned off, the sheet says Microphone is off or Speech recognition is off, and nothing is sent.

The phone's message bar is simpler than the Mac's. There is no @ list for mentioning people and no slash commands. For those, see The message box on the Mac.

Ideas for an empty chat

A brand-new, empty chat greets you by name ("Good morning", and so on) and offers up to six ideas to tap, such as Catch me up on what's moving, Draft an update for the team and What's blocking us?. Some may be suggestions Rally has worked out from your connected tools. Tap one and it is sent. These suggestions appear only on the iPhone.

Under Rally's replies

Each reply has a row of small buttons:

  • Copy copies the text. The icon turns into a tick when it has.
  • Speak reads the reply aloud. Tap it again to stop. Handy when your hands are full of shopping.
  • Share opens the iPhone share sheet with the reply's text.
  • The branch arrow starts a New breakout from that reply.

Copy and Share give you plain text. Saving a reply as an image or PDF, and exporting diagrams, are Mac only (see Saving and sharing what Rally wrote).

Files in the conversation

On the phone, a file in a message shows as a paperclip and its name. The app cannot open or preview files yet, and artifacts, versions and live site previews are on the Mac. Photos you send from the phone arrive as JPEG pictures named photo.jpg, whatever they were called in your library.

The Sidekicks tab

The second tab, with the hexagon icon, lists your Organization's Sidekicks with their status and description. Tap one to chat with it. If there are none yet, the tab says "Sidekicks in this organization will show up here."

The phone is for using Sidekicks, not making them. Creating and editing a Sidekick happen on the Mac. A Sidekick chat has no Breakouts.

Tap a link to a Rally Channel or Breakout (one that starts with https://rallywith.ai/app/) and it opens in the iPhone app. To share one, press and hold a Channel or Breakout and choose Copy channel link or Copy breakout link.

Links to things the phone does not have open a page instead. A link to a Space says "Space dashboards are available in Rally for Mac." and a link to a Sidekick says "Sidekicks are available in Rally for Mac.", even though the phone has a Sidekicks tab. If the app is not installed, the page says "If the app does not open, install Rally first." And if the thing the link points to has gone, the app tells you the view does not exist or is no longer available.

When a link won't open covers the other messages you might see.