Best Practices

These are the patterns that keep TimePally kiosks reliable in the wild. None of them are mandatory, but every one of them came out of a real support ticket.

Physical setup

• Avoid backlight. Don’t put the kiosk in front of a window or directly under a bright ceiling light. Strong backlight silhouettes the member’s face and tanks recognition accuracy.
• Keep the camera lens clean. A quick wipe with a microfibre cloth once a week.

Role assignment

• One Primary per location, always. The Primary is where every face for that location was enrolled. Treat it like a critical asset.
• Multiple Secondaries are cheap. Add a Secondary at every gate or queue point you care about. They cost nothing extra in subscription terms (within your plan’s device limit) and dramatically reduce queue times.
• Don’t make Primaries do double duty as queue terminals. Put the Primary in a quieter spot, an admin office or HR room, where enrolments can happen without rushing. Use Secondaries on the busy lines.

Daily operation

• Train front-desk staff on enrolment, not just clock-in. Bad enrolments are the root cause of most “the app doesn’t know me” complaints. Whoever owns the Primary should know Enrolling a Member’s Face.
• Watch for habitual failures. If the same member fails verification three days running, re-enrol them. Appearance drift is real : beards, weight, glasses, hairstyle.
• Re-enrol on significant changes. New glasses, major weight loss, shaved beard. Take the 30 seconds. Saves weeks of frustration later.

Updates and security

• Only install signed builds from TimePally. Don’t sideload an APK someone forwarded over WhatsApp. We sign every release; mismatched signatures are rejected by the activation flow.
• Update on the rollout schedule we publish. Skipping a version is fine; jumping forward several major versions can require re-enrolment if the face template format changed.
• Lock the kiosk to TimePally only. Turn on TimePally’s built-in Kiosk Mode on every device that lives at a gate. It pins the app to the foreground, keeps the screen on, and blocks Home / Recents / other apps, no extra MDM or device-owner setup needed.

When things go wrong

• Don’t reinstall as the first reflex. A reinstall wipes the queued attendance records. Always check the Troubleshooting page first.
• Capture device ID, app version, and a screenshot before contacting support. Saves a round trip.