Now that the app is live, the team is thinking about how it might expand it to work on Apple Watch, possibly via a widget, in the future. Prior to today’s launch, Shifts was tested among the founders’ friends and others in order to iterate on the idea and get feedback. Users can share their schedules with others via the app even if they’re not signed up to use Shifts.Īdditionally, because you can optionally enter the payment rate associated with any shift you create, the app can also help you track how much you’re expected to earn that month.Īnd you can overlay your personal calendar on top of the Shifts calendar right in the app, allowing you to see other important events and activities, which can help you with planning. The app also offers a Today widget for iOS, which allows workers to view their current schedules right from the lock screen or pull-down menu without having to launch the app directly.
You can add up to two shifts per day, and the app supports rotating and recurring shifts, as well. For instance, a morning shift could be indicated by a sun, a hospital shift by a red cross, and so on.Īfter creating a list of shift types, you can then tap on the calendar to add any shift to a given day. Like the company’s other apps, Shifts is well-built and beautifully designed, offering a way for shift workers to easily create their own custom shift types, each configured with their own color, name and icon for easy identification. The team set aside the work they were doing on an indie snowboarding game called Alto’s Adventure for a while, and developed Shifts instead. I’m sure that data is similar in other areas of the world, too, so it seemed like there was a business case for it.” “Some studies say it might be as high as 30 percent of people in North America. works during the evening, at night, or on rotating shifts,” he explains. “…After doing some research and talking to more people, we learned that – according to a recent study – one in five employees in the U.S. Ryan admits the idea “wasn’t all that exciting” to them at first, but they soon realized that there was a big pain point here that they could solve with Shifts. Because they knew Ryan and Jordan built apps, they asked them to consider building a solution just for them. The idea for the new Shifts app came from the founders’ friends who complained about not being able to keep track of their work schedules using traditional calendars.