All smartphone apps for standing desks today feature remote control of the desk itself. What’s so great about controlling your desk from your phone? At the most rudimentary level, it means your preferred height settings are your own, not intermingled with other users of the same desk. And you can sync with more than one desk; perhaps one at the corporate office, one at your home office, and others when you travel through airports, hotels and co-working spaces.

For shared workstations, the sad fact is that programmable height memories almost always go unused. Why? Because as soon as your personal settings are overwritten by the next user they are useless to you, and you’ll quickly tire of the exercise in futility. The only time they really work well is when there are no more than two users sharing the same desk and there are four memories—two of them dedicated for each user. This works well for a husband and wife sharing a home office standing desk, for example.

When you switch to using your smartphone to set your height preferences, your personal settings reside in your phone rather than in the desk’s handset controller. They won’t get inadvertently erased if the desk momentarily loses power. Most apps allow for four to six height favorites for each user.

With smartphone control, there’s no limit as to how many users can share a workstation. There’s also no limit on how many workstations a single individual can use. Any compatible desk they walk up to will instantly re-learn their personal settings over the Bluetooth sync.

Going along with your height settings are your personal usage statistics. This is important for apps that have built-in "health coach" features, which are basically notifications that remind you to change positions at intervals that you specified, in accordance with your personal health goals.

In case you’re wondering whether this is a useful feature or just a gimmick, note that a study conducted in Denmark with iMovR’s Lander Desk showed a 117% increase in standing desk usage at standing height simply from the addition of the health coaching feature. If you’re not familiar with it, the coach pushes notifications to the multi-color display in the desks controller and/or to the user’s smartphone to unobtrusively prompt the user to change position, without breaking their work flow.

An automatic benefit of controlling desks from smartphones that has been touted ever since the pandemic is the concept of "touchless controls." Meaning that the risk of contracting a nasty germ like norovirus from contact with an infected surface goes away if you never again touch the same controller pad as previous users, but rather control your desk from your phone instead. Since germs like Norovirus (a.k.a. "the cruise ship virus") aren’t killed as easily as COVID with the simple swipe of a Lysol wipe, this isn’t as inconsequential as it might sound.