Mastering the Mobile RMM Experience: Remote Troubleshooting From Anywhere with a PWA

Alerts arrive when you are away from a desk. The first device that sees a disk-full page or a CPU inflection is usually a phone. This post describes how ET Ducky handles that: the dashboard installs to a phone's home screen as a Progressive Web App, delivers alerts through the platform's native push service, and includes a remote desktop touch control scheme, so an alert can be investigated and fixed from the phone it arrived on.

The PWA install

A Progressive Web App is the web dashboard plus three standards. A web app manifest declares the name, icons, and standalone display mode. A service worker handles push events and routes notification taps. The browser provides the install flow: Chromium fires beforeinstallprompt on Android and desktop, and iOS uses Share, then Add to Home Screen. Once installed, ET Ducky opens full screen from its own icon.

The install model has a few practical properties:

• There is one codebase. Every feature is available on phones as soon as it is deployed.
• Updates apply on the next page load. There is no store review step and no population of installs waiting on an update prompt.
• Installation starts from the workspace URL. In the installed app, pulling down from the top of a page refreshes it.

One platform constraint to know about: Apple supports web push only for installed Home Screen web apps (iOS 16.4 and later), so on iPhone and iPad the install step is required before notifications work. The setup guide covers both platforms step by step.

Push notifications and on-call routing

Push is an alert channel type in the rule builder, alongside email, Slack, and PagerDuty. Delivery rides each phone's native push service (Google or Apple), so there is no polling and no meaningful battery cost, and notifications are encrypted end to end to the enrolled browser. Tapping a notification opens the workspace on the Alerts tab, where acknowledge, resolve, and the AI root-cause analysis are available.

Each push (and email) channel carries an audience: everyone in the workspace, admins only, specific members, or whoever is on call when the alert fires. The on-call schedule lives in the PSA. You can add individual shifts or generate a rotation, and edit any shift afterwards for swaps and vacations. If an alert with the on-call audience fires during a coverage gap, workspace admins are notified instead, so a scheduling hole does not silence an alert.

Enrollment is per device. Any member can enable push on as many devices as they want from the channel dialog. Settings → My Devices lists every device enrolled on your account with enrollment and last-seen times. Removing a lost or retired device takes one tap, and devices that stop responding are pruned automatically after repeated delivery failures.

Remote desktop with a touch control scheme

ET Ducky's remote desktop runs in the browser (DXGI capture on Windows, Wayland portal or x11vnc on Linux, H.264 over WebCodecs where hardware encoding is available). On a touch device, a touch layer activates automatically and the desktop toolbar folds into a single control bar at the bottom of the screen.

There are two pointer modes. In trackpad mode, the default, the whole screen acts as a trackpad driving a virtual cursor. In tap mode, touches act at the point you touch, which suits zoomed-in work and large targets. A button on the control bar switches between them, and the choice is remembered.

The gestures:

• Glide to move the cursor. Tap to click, twice for a double-click.
• Tap, then tap and hold, to drag. The button stays down while you glide and releases when you lift, which covers text selection and window moves.
• Hold still for a right-click. Movement cancels it, so a gliding finger does not open context menus.
• Two-finger drag to scroll. Pinch to zoom the view up to 4×, with a 1:1 reset on the bar.

The control bar also summons the phone's keyboard for typing, and a quick-key strip provides Esc, Tab, arrows, Delete, latching Ctrl/Alt/Shift for combos, and Ctrl+Alt+Del. The session tools (Ask Ducky diagnostics, remote shell, file transfer) open as a bottom sheet and close to return the full screen to the remote view. A settings sheet holds the session controls: quality, scale mode, the display picker for multi-monitor hosts, and keyboard capture.

A few details specific to phones: entering fullscreen switches to landscape automatically on Android, including when the phone's rotation lock is on (iPhone requires rotating the phone). Frames render at the phone's full native pixel density, so remote text stays legible. While a session is open, the OS back gesture and pull-to-refresh are suppressed, so a stray swipe cannot end the session; the End button on the control bar disconnects.

The rest of the dashboard on a phone

The same release covered the everyday surfaces. Dense tables render as cards on narrow screens. Crowded action clusters collapse into an action sheet. A bottom tab bar puts Dashboard, Agents, and Alerts one tap away on every page, including the documentation site, whenever you are signed in. For sign-in, verification codes autofill from the platform's suggestion bar, and capable devices offer one-tap passkey enrollment so later sign-ins use a fingerprint or face unlock.

The workflow end to end

A notification arrives. Tapping it opens the alert, with the triggering metrics and the AI root-cause analysis. From there you can open a remote desktop session on the affected machine, fix the issue, and resolve the alert. Each step uses the same features, session model, and audit trail as the desktop version, because it is the same application.

Setup takes a few minutes: install the app, create the push channel, enroll devices, and build the on-call rotation. The Mobile Notifications & On-Call guide covers each step, and the touch control scheme is documented under Remote Desktop, Controlling from Your Phone.