Kavanah's Android app is a free beta you download straight from kavanah.ai as a signed APK, not from Google Play. It runs on Android 7.0 or later, opens the same workspace you use on the web, sends push notifications, and checks for its own updates. Installing it takes one extra permission the first time, and this guide walks through it.
1. What the App Is
The Android app is a light native shell around Kavanah's web app, built with Tauri, which describes its apps as using the web view already on the user's system. So every page and feature the web app has is in the Android app the day it ships, laid out for a phone. The shell adds what a browser tab cannot: push notifications delivered through Firebase Cloud Messaging, which Google describes as a cross-platform messaging solution for sending messages reliably, and its own updater. Its minimum is Android 7.0, which Android's release notes list as API level 24.
2. Install It, Step by Step
On the phone, open kavanah.ai/download and tap Download for Android. Android's developer documentation explains what happens next: Android protects users from installing apps from sources other than Google Play, and blocks such installs until the user opts in. On Android 8.0 and later that opt-in is the Install unknown apps settings screen, granted to a particular source, here the browser you downloaded with; on Android 7.x it is the Unknown sources setting under Settings, Security. When Android asks, tap Settings, turn on Allow from this source, go back and tap Install. Android also notes that some network providers do not allow installing apps from unknown sources at all.
3. Updates Without a Store
With no store to update it, the app updates itself. When you return to it, at most every six hours, it checks Kavanah's published manifest for a newer version and offers Update or Later. Update downloads the new APK, checks its SHA-256 hash against the manifest so a truncated or swapped file is refused, and hands it to Android's own installer, which in turn refuses any APK not signed with the same key as the one you have. Later skips that version for a day.
4. Notifications
Allow notifications when the app asks, and Kavanah pushes for direct and group messages, @mentions, agent escalations, the open-approvals digest in workspaces that use it, and an agent reply that finished after you switched away.
5. Beta Caveats, Honestly
It is a beta, it is not on Google Play, and a phone managed by an employer or a carrier may not allow installs from unknown sources. If yours does not, Kavanah runs in Chrome on Android with nothing to install, and a browser that supports the Push API can still deliver notifications once you allow them.
For most teams the Android app is the fastest way to answer messages, approve agent actions and see what is due without opening a laptop. Download the APK, and see the other apps, on the Kavanah download page.
