Connectivity

Do you need wifi to scan a room?

No, but you do need some kind of connection. The useful question is what happens on one bar, and nobody has written that answer down for remodeling.

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The short answer

You do not need wifi. Cell data is fine. What you need is a connection, and it does not need to be a good one.

Search this question today and you get help desk articles from asset inventory software, event ticket scanners and parcel systems, each explaining its own offline mode to its own customers. There is a Houzz Pro article about offline mode, which is the closest thing to relevant, and it is written for a pro using the app himself. Useless if you are a remodeler about to send a capture link to a homeowner you have never met.

So here is the remodeling version, for the two cases that actually come up. Your own man capturing a job on site, and a homeowner capturing her own kitchen on her own phone while you are somewhere else.

Why the question matters more than it sounds

When a contractor asks this he is not asking about bandwidth. He is picturing the failure. A homeowner standing in a basement bathroom with one bar, watching a progress wheel, giving up, and never coming back.

He is right to picture it, because that homeowner gets exactly one attempt. Your own guy will retry. He is being paid to. A customer who tried once and saw a spinner has quietly decided your company is fiddly, and you will never hear about it.

Which means the only connectivity answer worth anything is the one about weak signal, not the one about no signal. Every page currently ranking describes two states, online and offline. The state that loses you the job is the one in between, and none of them cover it.

Good signal against one bar

	Strong connection	One bar
Measuring with LiDAR	Happens on the phone itself. The sensor does not touch the network.	The same. Measuring does not slow down, because nothing is being sent while she measures.
Photos	Each one goes up as it is taken. She does not notice it happening.	Each one still goes up, just slower. The capture takes longer. Nothing is held back waiting on the rest.
If the signal drops part way	Not applicable.	The photos already sent are already with you. She picks up where she stopped rather than starting the room again.
What you receive	The full capture, usually before she has put the phone down.	The same capture, a few minutes later.
What she installs	Nothing. It opens in her browser.	Nothing. Same link.

Photos upload one at a time as they are taken. That is the whole reason a weak connection costs you minutes instead of the job.

What to do when the house has no service at all

Point her at the router

Most houses with no cell service have wifi. The capture runs in a browser, so her home network is a connection like any other.

Lean on the typed sizes fallback

If her phone has no LiDAR sensor the capture asks for photos plus the room dimensions she types in. Those sizes are a few characters and they go through on almost nothing.

Let her do it in two sittings

Photos that already went up are already up. She can leave the basement, find signal upstairs and finish.

Send your own man if the house is genuinely dead

A job your own people capture on site is not metered on any plan. That is what the seats on Crew and Shop are for.

Why one photo at a time is the part that matters

There are two ways to build a capture tool. Hold everything on the device and send it in one go at the end, or send each piece as it is made.

The first is simpler to build and it feels faster on a good connection. It is also the one that loses the whole room when the upload dies at eighty percent, which on a weak connection is exactly where uploads die.

ScanToScope sends each photo as it is taken. On a strong connection you cannot tell the difference. On one bar in a basement the difference is the entire job.

What we do not claim is a full offline mode. With no connection of any kind the capture cannot reach us, and we would rather say so here than have you find out from a customer.

Common questions

Does the homeowner need to install an app?

No. She taps the link you send and it opens in her phone browser. Nothing to download, no account to make, no app store.

Does LiDAR work without an internet connection?

The sensor does. Measuring happens on the phone. What needs a connection is getting the result to you, and the dimensions are a very small amount of data next to the photos.

What if she has an Android or an older iPhone?

Then there is no LiDAR sensor and the capture falls back to photos plus the room sizes she types in. Nothing is measured from a photograph. The typed dimensions are what the quote is built on.

Will a weak connection hurt the photo quality?

No. They are the same photos. A slow connection changes how long they take to arrive, not what they look like when they get here.

Can my crew capture a gut job with no power or wifi on site?

If the phone has cell service, yes. Gut jobs are usually the easiest captures there are, because nothing is in the way of the sensor.

How much data does a capture use?

It is a handful of photographs, so think in the tens of megabytes rather than hundreds. It is closer to sending a few pictures in a message than to streaming anything.