The phone app says "no active conversations" but the chats are there
Your inbox can be opened from a phone app, and most teams use it to answer outside office hours. There is one thing worth knowing before you hand it to your staff, because without it the app looks broken.
An empty screen that is not a fault
On first open the app says "There are no active conversations in this group", while on the computer the conversations are plainly there, sometimes dozens of them.
There is a single cause: the app opens on the "Mine" filter, meaning conversations already assigned to you by name. New incoming chats are not assigned to anyone, deliberately, because whoever is on shift should be free to pick them up. So "Mine" really is empty for you, and that is correct. The filter is wrong, not the data.
The fix, once
- Tap the filter icon at the top right of the Conversations screen.
- Under Assignee Type, choose All.
- Leave Status on Open.
- Save. Every incoming conversation appears immediately.
The app remembers this, so you will not have to repeat it. Pass the step on to every member of staff who installs the app, because the starting filter is stored per phone, not per account.
The second filter people miss: inbox
On the same row there is one more button holding an inbox name. If a specific inbox is selected there, the app shows only chats from that inbox and hides everything else.
What makes this one hard to guess is that the app remembers the choice. If the inbox you once selected has since been replaced or rebuilt, the app keeps filtering on an inbox that no longer exists. The result is not an error message but an empty list that looks exactly like a fault.
The fix: tap Clear at the top left of the filter screen. The number beside it, for example Clear (2), tells you how many filters are currently active. Then set what you actually want: Assignee All, Status Open.
When Mine becomes useful
Once your team gets into the habit of assigning conversations, "Mine" turns into a tidy personal worklist holding only what you are responsible for. Clinics with several nurses usually end up alternating between the two: All to see the queue, Mine to work through their own share.
If it is still empty on All
If the filter says All and the inbox is still empty, the cause is usually inbox access rather than filters. Read adding staff to your inbox, the section on staff whose inbox looks empty.