Signing on mobile just got a major upgrade

More than two-thirds of the documents signed through SignTheDoc are now signed on a phone. That number has been climbing for three years, and for most of that time our mobile experience was a competent adaptation of a desktop product. Version 4.0 stops adapting and starts designing for the phone first.

One thumb, one column

The old mobile flow rendered the document at full width and asked you to pinch and pan between fields. It was faithful to the page and miserable to use. The new flow keeps the document visible but adds a guided mode: a persistent bar at the bottom shows how many fields remain and jumps you to the next one.

Every interactive control now sits in the lower half of the screen, within thumb reach. You can still scroll the full document at any point — plenty of people want to read what they are signing, and we are not about to discourage that.

Offline drafts

People sign in places with bad signal. Basements, trains, rural properties, hospital car parks. Previously a dropped connection mid-signature meant starting over, which is a genuinely awful experience when you have just carefully drawn your name.

The app now keeps a local draft of your in-progress signing session. Fill in fields, adopt a signature, place it — all of it persists on-device. When connectivity returns, the app syncs and completes the submission. If you close the app entirely, the draft is still there when you come back.

Reminders that respect people

Push reminders are the most effective completion tool we have and the easiest to abuse. Our rules are deliberately conservative:

• At most one push per document per day, regardless of sender settings
• Nothing between 9pm and 8am in the recipient timezone
• A single tap to snooze a document for a week
• Per-sender muting, so one enthusiastic sender cannot ruin notifications for you

Senders sometimes ask us to remove these limits. We do not. A recipient who mutes all notifications is worse for the sender than a recipient who gets one well-timed reminder.

Drawing that feels like drawing

Signature capture was rebuilt around pointer prediction and velocity-based stroke weighting. In plain terms: the line keeps up with your finger, and it thins where you move quickly, the way a pen does. On devices with a stylus we read pressure directly.

We also added an undo for the last stroke. Previously your only option was to clear and start over, which is a small thing that annoyed a surprising number of people, ourselves included.

Accessibility

The new flow is fully navigable with VoiceOver and TalkBack. Every field announces its type, its required state, and its position in the sequence. Dynamic Type is honoured up to the largest accessibility sizes without clipping, and the guided mode is operable entirely through screen-reader gestures.

For anyone who cannot comfortably draw a signature, the type-to-sign option produces a rendered signature with identical legal standing. That has always been true, but it is now offered with equal prominence rather than tucked behind a link.

Reading long documents on a small screen

A forty-page agreement on a phone is genuinely difficult, and pretending otherwise does nobody any favours. We added two things that help without pretending to solve it.

A document outline lets you jump between sections rather than scrolling continuously, and a reflow view renders the text at a comfortable size in a single column rather than as a scaled-down page image. Reflow is explicitly a reading aid — signing always happens against the true page layout, so what you sign is what the document actually says.

We also added "email me this document" prominently. Some people want to read a long contract on a larger screen, and making that easy is better than watching them abandon on a phone.

What we removed

Two features came out in 4.0. Fingerprint-to-sign, which let a biometric unlock stand in for placing a signature, was removed because it created a genuine misunderstanding — several users believed their fingerprint was being recorded as the signature. It was not; it was authenticating the session. The confusion was our fault for the framing.

We also removed the in-app document scanner. It was mediocre compared to the scanning built into both mobile operating systems, and maintaining it was pulling effort from the signing flow. Uploading from your phone's own scanner works better.

Getting it

Version 4.0 is rolling out on iOS and Android now. Recipients do not need the app to sign — the browser flow received the same guided-mode treatment in the same release. The app is for people who sign often enough to want drafts and push reminders.