BEFORE THE FIRST SHIFT
Set the phone up, or the orders stop arriving
Android saves battery by putting apps it thinks are idle to sleep. A sleeping courier app means no order pings, and the rider finds out by sitting in a good spot for twenty minutes wondering why nothing comes. Bolt's own advice is four lines: leave location on, turn off data and battery saving, keep the app open and allowed to run in the background, and don't keep flipping yourself offline. Everything below is what those four lines mean in the actual menus.
There are two Bolt apps, and the obvious one is wrong. The green Bolt is the passenger app. The work app is Bolt Courier, dark icon with a bike. The settings here were first applied to the passenger app by mistake, which changes nothing about whether orders arrive.
The path names below are Samsung's. Other makes call the same menus something else, so look for the sense of it rather than the exact words. Checked on a Samsung Galaxy XCover7 with Bolt Courier 1.64.0 on 23 September 2026.
LONG-PRESS THE BOLT COURIER ICON, THEN APP INFO
- Permissions, Location: allow all the time, precise location on. Already set here.
- Battery: unrestricted. Already set here.
- Mobile data: both background toggles on — background data, and data while Data saver is on. Already set here.
- Manage app if unused: off. This one was on, and was switched off. Left on, Android eventually strips the app's permissions back for you.
- Appear on top: on. Already set here; it is what lets order prompts show over whatever else is on screen.
THEN SETTINGS, BATTERY
- Power saving: off. Already off here.
- Background usage limits, "Put unused apps to sleep": off. This one was on, and was switched off. It is the setting most likely to cost an evening's orders.
- Deep sleeping apps: Bolt Courier must not be in that list. It wasn't.
- Never auto sleeping apps: the list was empty and Bolt Courier was not offered in the picker at all. With the sleep setting above turned off this list does nothing, so it was left alone. Why the app isn't offered was not established.
- Settings, Connections, Data usage, Data saver: optional. The app is already allowed through it by the mobile-data step, so it changes nothing for Bolt Courier. The state on this phone wasn't recorded.
On the road the rules are simpler: leave the app open and never swipe it away from recent apps, carry a power bank, and if orders dry up go offline and back online inside the app rather than force-closing it.
WHAT IT COSTS IN DATA
foreground 629 MBbackground 38 MB
Any SIM plan for this work needs to carry that comfortably — and on top of whatever else the phone does.
THE APP ITSELF
Built to be demoed, not to be worked
None of this is field-tested. It reads like something engineered and approved in a meeting room, not shaped by anyone who's actually done a shift with it.
- The "go offline" button is oversized. It sits big and easy to hit — exactly where a thumb lands by accident, on a screen where one wrong tap ends the shift you're mid-shift on.
- On a multi-order run, the map doesn't say which pin is which package. Tap a pin, get a location — not which of the bags in your possession it belongs to. Working it out is on the rider, every time.
- Getting covered by another app can log you out. Overlaid by navigation or anything else running on top, and the app doesn't just pause — it drops the session.
- Changing the colour theme needs a full app restart to actually take effect — not a live switch, a relaunch.