A tow truck app is a dispatch problem with a winch on the end.
Every tow truck app is three small apps wearing one icon. A dispatcher takes a call and picks a truck. A driver gets the job on a phone, in the rain, on one bar of signal. And somebody weeks later has to prove what happened. The dispatch half is the same shape as the rest of field service apps. The rest is specific to towing: a vehicle that is not yours, an owner who did not call you, and a bill somebody will contest.
This page covers the job states a towing dispatch app needs, what a dispatcher can honestly see of a truck, what the tow ticket has to hold, and why roadside work and impound work are two records in one app.
See what your ticket can proveThe short version
Dispatch is one question, the ticket is the whole argument.
The software part of towing is small: a job, a truck, a driver and a row of timestamps. The expensive part is the second half, because a tow often ends in a bill the owner never agreed to in advance, and your record is the only thing standing between you and a refund.
So build the ticket first and the map last. A dispatcher who can watch every truck crawl across a map but cannot say who authorised Tuesday's impound has the wrong app.
A job is a queue of one question: who is going?
A towing dispatch app has fewer states than people expect, and the value sits in the times between them. Called in. Assigned. Accepted. Rolling. On scene. Hooked. Dropped. Cleared. Eight rows, each with a time and the person who moved it. Almost every argument you have later, with a customer, a motor club or your own driver, is answered by that list.
The one decision a dispatcher makes is who goes, and that is a knowledge problem, not a routing one. Which truck is free, which truck can take this vehicle, which driver knows that car park. A flatbed for an all wheel drive, a wheel lift for a tight ramp, a heavy wrecker for a box truck. If the same trucks also do booked work, transport runs and scheduled recoveries, the planning side starts to look like a field service scheduling app, and most yards need both.
Then the job has to reach a phone sitting in a cup holder. This is where homemade tools quietly fail: a job on a screen nobody is looking at is not assigned. The mechanics of getting the call to the driver are their own subject. The design rule is short. Assignment is not complete until the driver has pressed something, and an unaccepted job goes back in the queue.
What a dispatcher can honestly see of a truck
Ask anyone to describe a tow dispatch software app and you get a map with trucks moving on it. That is buildable and it is not free. Live location is a background job on a phone, and both platforms treat background location as something you earn rather than switch on.
In an Expo project, which is what most cross platform builds are today, that means specific keys and permissions. iOS needs NSLocationWhenInUseUsageDescription and NSLocationAlwaysAndWhenInUseUsageDescription, and location added to UIBackgroundModes. Android needs ACCESS_BACKGROUND_LOCATION on top of a granted foreground permission, plus FOREGROUND_SERVICE and FOREGROUND_SERVICE_LOCATION, and Google Play requires you to request access to the background permission and submit the app for review. A terminated Android app will not restart itself when a location event arrives.
It is worth being plain about AI app builders, because the question comes up first. Newly's documentation describes a Postgres database, an API service and file storage for the apps it builds, and documents no live subscription channel between devices. Location is not in the list of packages already installed, so adding it triggers a native build. A driver screen can post coordinates to your own API and a dispatch screen can ask for them on a timer. A genuinely live map, and tracking that continues while the app is closed, is not something we verified. Treat it as work to schedule, not a feature you are handed.
There is a cheaper answer most operations end up preferring. A driver who presses On scene and Hooked gives the dispatcher the two facts customers ring about. A dot sliding along a road answers a question nobody asked, and spends battery on the one device the driver needs all shift.
Expo documentation, Location: background location permissions and background modes
The tow ticket is what you will be arguing about
A nonconsent tow, the kind where the owner did not call you, is regulated by state, and those rules reach into your data model. Texas rules for towing companies require a record of every nonconsent tow including the vehicle description with a license or vehicle identification number if available, a statement describing the reason for towing the vehicle, the location it was towed from, and the storage location. That is a floor, not a ceiling, and your state has its own list. Read it before you design the form.
Photographs are the field nobody regrets. Pictures of the vehicle before the hookup, taken where it stood, with the signage in frame when the tow is from private property, end most disputes before they start. Take them inside the app, attached to the job and stamped by the app. Photos sent to the office in a group chat lose their job number within a day.
The release is its own record. Somebody collects the vehicle, pays, signs and drives off, and that handover deserves what a proof of delivery app gives a parcel: who took it, when, what they signed and the condition it was in. Storage charges accrue by day, so the drop time and the release time are both money.
Offline matters more here than in most field work. Impound lots, underground car parks and rural verges are where the signal is not. The ticket has to be fillable with no bars and sent when there are some, which means the job is stored on the device and synced later. Decide that early, because it shapes everything else.
16 Texas Administrative Code 86.705, responsibilities of a towing company
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What your ticket can prove
Tap the fields a driver really captures at the scene. What is left over is what the argument will be about six weeks later.
4 of 8 captured
Missing: who authorised it, with a phone number, photos taken before the hookup, call, hookup and drop times, rate applied and who gets billed. Every gap is a sentence somebody writes later from memory.
Roadside assistance and impound work are not the same job
Most yards run a mix, and the mix is what breaks a single form. A roadside assistance app is about a stranded person: a jump start, a lockout, a tyre change, a tow to a garage, somebody waiting who wants an honest arrival time. Impound and private property work is about a vehicle whose owner is not there and may be furious later. Same truck, different record, different money.
Motor club work is a third shape. Calls arrive from somebody else's system carrying their job number, their rate and their time targets, and payment depends on hitting those and supplying evidence in their format. If most of your volume comes through clubs, a real part of your app is matching their numbers to your jobs and catching the ones worked and never paid.
The practical answer is one job record with a type on it and a form that changes with the type. Not three apps, and not one form of twenty fields where twelve are always blank. The type also decides who gets billed, the field everyone forgets until the first month of invoicing.
What each option gives a yard
| Option | Dispatcher sees the truck | Ticket survives a dispute | Works with no signal | Fits your own rates |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Phone calls and a paper ticket | a radio call | if it is legible | Yes | Yes |
| Group chat and camera roll | No | No | No | in your head |
| Motor club app on the driver's phone | for their jobs | their record, not yours | No | No |
| Off-the-shelf tow dispatch software | Yes | Yes | varies | within its fields |
| A tow app you build | only if you build it | Yes | if built for it | Yes |
Building one around your own yard
Tow dispatch software exists, and for plenty of yards buying it is the right call. It is priced per truck per month, shaped around companies whose volume is mostly club work, and it covers most of what you need on day one. The friction is at the edges: the rate you only apply after six in the evening, the second yard with different storage pricing, the rotation paperwork specific to your county.
Building your own is a different size of job than it used to be. Newly is an AI app builder: you describe the app in plain English, including your job types and the exact fields your tickets need, and it writes a real React Native and Expo project you own, runs it on a cloud simulator while it builds, and uploads iOS builds to TestFlight using your own Apple Developer account. Plans start at $25 a month and there is no free plan. It does not arrive with a dispatch engine, a motor club integration or card processing, and taking payment means your own provider under your own account.
Start narrow. One truck, one driver, the ticket and the eight timestamps, run alongside the paper for two weeks. The fields your driver keeps reaching for on paper are the ones the app is missing.
Questions people ask about tow truck apps
Two things. It moves a job from the call to the clear, with a time and a name on every step, so a dispatcher knows which truck is on what. And it produces the record: photos, who authorised the tow, where the vehicle came from, where it is stored and what is owed. Dispatch is the visible half. The record is the half that matters when the bill is disputed.
Describe the jobs your trucks actually do
Write down the eight times you want stamped and the fields a ticket cannot go without, then build the app around that list rather than around a map.
Start building