The app half of preventive maintenance software is used in a completely different posture from the planning half. Nobody sets up an asset hierarchy on a phone. What happens on a phone is a technician in a plant room, standing up, possibly with gloves on, frequently with no signal, trying to record that a visit was done and one check failed. That is the whole job, and products that shrink the desktop screen instead of designing for it are the ones technicians route around by writing on paper.
Completing a visit is the one interaction that matters
Open the app, find today's asset, tick the checks, note the one that failed, add a photo, done. If that takes more than a handful of taps, or if finding the asset means navigating a hierarchy, it will be done at the end of the day from memory, which is the same as not being done. Time the path from opening the app to a completed visit and judge the product on that number.
No signal is the normal case, not the edge case
Plant rooms, basements, roofs and lift motor rooms are exactly where the assets are and exactly where the signal is not. An app that needs a connection to load the checklist has failed at the moment of use. Offline capture with a sync when the phone comes back into range is not a premium feature here, it is the difference between a record and a memory.
Photographs are the underrated half
A photo of a failed check answers more questions later than any amount of text, and it takes two seconds to capture. Check that a photo attaches to the specific check rather than to the visit as a whole, because a folder of twenty images against one visit is only marginally better than no images at all.
Questions people ask about preventive maintenance app
Should technicians have their own logins?
Yes, and it costs little: the record of who did what is most of the value of keeping a history, and a shared login destroys it. It also means access ends cleanly when somebody leaves.
Is a mobile web page enough instead of an app?
For looking things up, usually. It falls down on offline use and on photographs, which are the two things that matter most in a plant room.
What should never be on the phone?
Setting up assets and intervals, editing checklists, and anything covering more than one asset at a time. Those are desk work, and cramming them onto a phone is what makes an app feel unusable.