Discover best practices and tips for branding your Now Mobile experience to customise the look and feel to align with your organisation’s identity.
Branding V/S Theming:
Branding: The Pre-Login Experience
Branding refers to everything the user sees before logging in to the app. This is your opportunity to make a strong first impression and align the app with your organisation’s identity.
Branding includes:
- App Icon – Your company’s logo or symbol
- App Name – Customised to reflect your brand
- Splash Screen – A branded welcome screen that appears during app launch
This is achieved through Mobile Publishing, a white-labelling solution that allows you to create branded versions of ServiceNow’s general availability (GA) apps like Now Mobile and Agent. These branded apps retain all internal workflows and theming configurations, ensuring a seamless experience. You can distribute your branded app both privately using enterprise mobility management (EMM) tools and publicly via Apple App Store and Google Play Store
Theming: The In-App Experience
Once the user logs in, theming takes over. This is where you define the look and feel of the app’s interface to match your organisation’s visual identity.
Theming includes:
- Themes and Navigation Bar
- UI Rules
- Icons and Buttons
- Input Fields and Descriptions
- Role-based Customisation
Theming is applied to both GA and branded apps, allowing you to tailor the experience for different user roles or departments. For example, managers might see a different theme than frontline employees, enhancing relevance and usability
Theming In Now Mobile
Prior to the Utah release, theming capabilities were limited—many UI elements like buttons, text, and icons were hardcoded, making it difficult to align the mobile experience with brand identity. The theming model was also disconnected from the desktop experience.
With Utah, ServiceNow introduced Unified Mobile Theming under the Next Experience, replacing hardcoded colours with named colour variables for greater flexibility and consistency across platforms
In Vancouver, this was further enhanced with theme variant support, allowing users to toggle between light and dark modes independently. Users can now also create custom themes from scratch, ensuring a personalised and inclusive experience.
Theme Builder in Now Mobile: A Powerful, Inclusive Tool for Brand Alignment
Creating a consistent and branded mobile experience is essential for employee engagement and organisational identity. ServiceNow’s Theme Builder is a powerful and intuitive tool that enables administrators to design native themes for both Now Mobile and portal experiences, aligning them seamlessly with corporate branding.
Build Your Brand with Ease
Theme Builder allows you to define your app’s visual identity by selecting primary, secondary, and neutral colours, fonts, and styles that reflect your brand. This ensures that the mobile experience feels familiar and cohesive for employees, reinforcing a sense of belonging and trust 1. The interface is designed to be user-friendly, enabling theme creation in just a few steps—often within minutes. During live sessions, co-hosts like Ashutosh Nagaria demonstrate how quickly and effectively this can be done, showcasing real-time transformations from the default Polaris theme to a fully branded experience 3.
Support for Theme Variants
With the Vancouver release, Theme Builder introduced support for theme variants, including light and dark modes. This empowers users to personalise their experience without affecting others on the same instance. Organisations can also create entirely custom themes beyond the default options, offering flexibility for different departments or user roles.
Accessibility Built-In
One of Theme Builder’s standout features is its automatic accessibility validation. It detects issues such as poor contrast or non-compliant colour combinations and guides users to resolve them, ensuring that the final theme meets WCAG 2.1 AA standards. This makes the app more inclusive and usable for all employees, regardless of visual ability.
Custom Fonts for Enhanced Usability
Recent updates allow administrators to upload and manage up to 10 custom font families, each with multiple styles like bold or italic. This enhances readability and visual clarity, helping organisations maintain a polished and professional look across their ServiceNow environment.
Guided Experience and Upgrade Safety
Theme Builder is not just powerful—it’s also safe and guided. It provides contextual support, previews, and upgrade-safe configurations, ensuring that branding changes don’t disrupt platform stability. The tool hides complexity and focuses users on the task at hand, making it accessible even to those without deep technical expertise.
Real-Time Preview and Application
The tool offers a live preview of how themes will appear on mobile screens, including splash screens, navigation bars, buttons, and input fields. This visual feedback helps users make informed design choices and ensures that the final product aligns with their expectations.
Theme Builder is a game-changer for organisations looking to deliver a branded, accessible, and user-friendly mobile experience. Whether you're refreshing your app’s look or launching a new internal portal, Theme Builder provides the tools to do it quickly, safely, and beautifully.
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How to get access?
To create your own themes follow the product documentation on Create a theme with Theme Builder Read more about theme builder on: |
Theming MESP Pages in Now Mobile: Extending Brand Identity Beyond Native Screens
Not only can you build native themes for your Now Mobile app using Theme Builder, but you can also extend this branding to MESP pages—the Mobile Employee Service Portal pages that are essentially mobile-optimised portal pages embedded within the app. These MESP pages are designed to deliver a native look and feel while retaining the flexibility of web-based content delivery.
How Theming Works on MESP?
MESP pages inherit their styling from the Polaris theme, which uses a set of CSS variables prefixed with --now-. These variables govern the appearance of icons, buttons, backgrounds, and other UI elements. While these variables are not directly editable, Theme Builder can impact several of them, allowing for partial customisation of MESP styling.
For example, in the default Polaris theme, the heart icon used to favourite items might appear in a golden colour. If your brand palette calls for a different accent—say, a teal or crimson—you can override these default styles by creating CSS includes. These overrides allow you to inject custom styles that align with your brand identity.
Bridging Native and Web Experiences
This approach ensures that your employees experience a visually consistent interface whether they’re interacting with native mobile screens or embedded MESP pages. It also supports theme variant propagation, meaning that if a user selects a dark theme for their mobile client, the MESP pages will reflect that choice without affecting other users.
Additionally, ServiceNow provides scriptable APIs to retrieve and manipulate theme variables based on mobile client type or theme ID. These APIs allow developers to programmatically align MESP styling with the selected mobile theme, ensuring deeper integration and consistency
Instance Pre-Fill: Simplifying Login for Seamless Mobile Access
One of the most common sources of friction in mobile app adoption is the login process—especially when users are required to manually enter their instance URL every time they access the app. ServiceNow addresses this challenge with a feature called Instance Pre-Fill, designed to streamline the login experience and reduce barriers to entry.
How it works?
In General Availability (GA) apps—like the standard Now Mobile and Agent apps available on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store—users are prompted to enter their instance URL only during their first login. Once entered, the mobile client stores this information locally, allowing users to bypass the instance selection screen in future sessions
For branded apps created via Mobile Publishing, the experience is even more seamless. These apps can have the instance URL baked in during the build process, meaning users are taken directly to the login screen without needing to enter any instance details—not even once
This is especially valuable for large organisations with distributed workforces, where simplifying access can significantly boost adoption and reduce support overhead.
Instance Pre-Fill is part of a broader set of login improvements that also include:
- Single Instance Login: If only one instance is defined, the app skips the instance selection screen entirely
- Pre-Login Screens: Organisations can configure public-facing content (e.g., a company webpage or help portal) to appear before login, offering unauthenticated access to useful resources
- MDM and Deeplinking Support: For enterprises using mobile device management (MDM) tools, instance URLs can be pre-populated via configuration profiles or deep links
By reducing the number of steps required to access the app, Instance Pre-Fill:
- Improves user experience and reduces frustration
- Boosts adoption rates across employee groups
- Minimises support tickets related to login issues
- Supports branding and trust by delivering a polished, seamless entry point
Whether you're using GA apps or deploying branded versions via Mobile Publishing, Instance Pre-Fill ensures that your employees can get to what they need—quickly and effortlessly.
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How to get access?
Read more on Instance Pre-fill product documentation |
Pre-Login Access: Delivering Public Content Seamlessly in Now Mobile
One of the simplest yet impactful enhancements you can make to your mobile experience is enabling Pre-Login Access. This feature allows organisations to surface public-facing content to employees even before they log into the Now Mobile app, creating a frictionless and informative entry point.
With minimal configuration, administrators can link any webpage URL to the app’s pre-login screen. This means that announcements, help articles, onboarding resources, or any other public content can be made instantly accessible. For example, if you want to highlight a new company initiative or share a public-facing update, simply add the relevant webpage URL to the configuration.
As shown in image above the ServiceNow public website was used as a demonstration. Once configured, employees launching the app will see this content immediately—without needing to log in. This is especially useful for:
- New hires who haven’t received credentials yet
- Visitors or contractors accessing general information
- All employees needing quick access to updates or resources
Pre-login access:
- Reduces friction by eliminating unnecessary login steps for general content
- Improves communication by surfacing timely announcements
- Supports onboarding and external engagement
- Enhances usability for hybrid or distributed workforces
This feature complements other login enhancements like Instance Pre-Fill, ensuring that your mobile experience is not only branded and themed but also efficient and user-friendly.
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How to get access?
Pre-login access is available from Vancouver, to set up a pre-login access for your employees, follow the steps below: Create a Mobile Property: Name: preLoginLandingPage Application: Now Mobile Description: Optional Type: JSON Value: {"url":"ENTER_URL_HERE"} Active: Check Is Public: Check Mobile Application: Request |
Branding and Mobile Publishing in Now Mobile: Creating a Seamless Pre-Login Experience
The pre-login experience in Now Mobile is your organisation’s first opportunity to make a strong impression. Through Mobile Publishing, ServiceNow offers a powerful way to create branded mobile apps that reflect your company’s identity and streamline access for employees.
What Is Mobile Publishing?
Think of Mobile Publishing as mobile white-labelling. It enables you to create a branded version of ServiceNow’s general availability (GA) apps—Now Mobile and Agent—with your own:
- App Icon (e.g., company logo)
- App Name
- Splash Screen
These branded apps retain all internal workflows and theming configurations applied to GA apps, ensuring a consistent and seamless experience
Types of Mobile Apps
ServiceNow supports three types of mobile apps:
- GA Apps – Standard Now Mobile and Agent apps available on public app stores.
- Branded Apps – White-labelled versions of GA apps with your organisation’s branding.
- Custom Apps – Purpose-built apps tailored to specific use cases, such as combining Agent and Now Mobile into one app or creating apps for distinct user personas or business units
Distribution Options
Branded apps can be distributed:
- Publicly via the Apple App Store and Google Play Store
- Privately using enterprise mobility management (EMM) tools or internal channels
Custom Apps for Unique Use Cases
If your organisation needs more than just branding—such as combining multiple apps or supporting executives across different companies—you can request a custom app. These apps are built to support unique workflows and branding requirements. For example:
- A single app combining Agent and Now Mobile
- Multiple apps for different departments or brands
- Apps for executives managing multiple companies on one device
To request a custom app, contact your ServiceNow sales representative, who will coordinate with the Mobile Publishing team to initiate the build process
Branded apps also support instance pre-fill, meaning the instance URL is baked into the app. Employees are taken directly to the login screen without needing to enter the instance manually—even once. This eliminates a common source of friction and improves adoption
Submitting a Branded App Request: The Mobile Publishing Build Process
Creating a branded version of your Now Mobile or Agent app through Mobile Publishing involves a structured build process designed to ensure quality, compliance, and timely delivery. This process allows organisations to deliver a mobile experience that reflects their brand identity while maintaining all the internal workflows and theming configurations of ServiceNow’s general availability (GA) apps.
Step-by-Step Build Process
i. Submit Your Request
Begin by submitting a build request through your ServiceNow instance. You’ll need to provide:
- Device type (Android, iOS, or both)
- App name
- App icon
- Splash screen
- Target client (Now Mobile or Agent)
ii. App Build
ServiceNow will build the app based on your specifications.
iii. Testing and Acceptance
You’ll receive a test version to validate branding elements (icon, name, splash screen) and functionality. This is your opportunity to ensure everything aligns with your brand before deployment
iv. Deployment
Once approved, the app can be deployed to employees via your chosen distribution method—either publicly through the Apple App Store and Google Play Store or privately using enterprise mobility management (EMM) tools
Timelines and Recommendations
Android Only Submission:
Typically completed in less than a week, often within a few hours. If your go-live date is near, it’s recommended to start with Android to validate branding quickly before submitting for iOS
iOS Submission:
May take up to 1 week for public distribution. For private distribution, expect 2–4 weeks due to Apple’s manual review process involving human testers
Joint Submission:
Delivered together, based on the longest timeline—usually iOS. If speed is critical, staggered submission (Android first) is advised
Interim Testing with GA Apps
While your branded app is being built, you can replicate the experience using GA apps (Now Mobile or Agent) to test workflows, theming, and functionality. This ensures a smooth transition once your branded app is ready
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How to get access?
Plugins Required: "Mobile Publishing" and is available with Pro and Enterprise packages, App Engine Studio SKU and as a Standalone SKU. Technical details: Refer to Custom - type apps : https://www.servicenow.com/docs/bundle/zurich-mobile/page/administer/tablet-mobile-ui/concept/mob-pu... Mobile publishing YT video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIFOJFJroQo&list=PLkGSnjw5y2U5bf79MQ1BPDk6hwOjXY54D&index=13 Mobile publishing FAQ community article: https://www.servicenow.com/community/mobile-apps-platform-articles/mobile-publishing-faq/ta-p/230245... Refer to Mobile branding and publishing product documentation for more: Publish mobile apps with custom branding |
Frequently Asked Questions:
1. Can we rebrand the mobile app instead of using "Now Mobile" in the app store?
Yes, this is possible using Mobile Publishing. Learn more here: https://www.servicenow.com/docs/bundle/zurich-mobile/page/administer/tablet-mobile-ui/concept/mobile...
2. Is Now Mobile compatible with App Engine apps?
Yes, it supports App Engine apps. Refer to the documentation: https://www.servicenow.com/docs/bundle/zurich-mobile/page/administer/tablet-mobile-ui/concept/sg-mob...
3. Are all screens being moved to native mobile apps instead of progressive web app (PWA) screens?
We’re working towards a hybrid experience that combines native screens with MESP (Mobile Embedded Service Portal) responsive pages.
4. What is an MESP?
MESP stands for Mobile Embedded Service Portal, used to deliver responsive web content within the mobile app.
5. Can we customise the MESP theme using CSS includes, even if the theme file is read-only?
Yes, while the MESP theme file is read-only, you can override styles using CSS includes.
6. Is it possible to upload custom fonts to the mobile app?
Yes, follow the steps outlined here: https://www.servicenow.com/docs/bundle/zurich-platform-user-interface/page/administer/navigation-and...
7. Why does the Theme Builder preview show the workspace view when editing mobile themes?
The theme includes shared variables (e.g. primary, secondary colours) used across portal, workspace, and mobile, hence the preview reflects workspace styling.
8. Does the mobile app support real-time push notifications?
Yes, Now Mobile supports native push notifications on both Android and iOS. Documentation: https://www.servicenow.com/docs/bundle/zurich-mobile/page/administer/tablet-mobile-ui/concept/sg-mob...
9. Can we change the icon colour for Topics or Quick Links using themes in MESP?
You can upload a custom icon image with your desired colour directly to the topic record.
10. Is Virtual Agent available on mobile for live chat support?
Yes, Virtual Agent (VA) is available on mobile.
11. How can we test across Dev and QA environments on mobile?
The app supports multi-instance switching. You’ll see an icon in the top-left corner—tap it twice to switch between instances without re-authenticating.
12. What’s the difference between branding and theming in Now Mobile?
Branding refers to pre-login customisation—like app name, icon, and splash screen—done via Mobile Publishing. Theming refers to post-login styling, such as colours and fonts, which can be applied to both branded and GA apps.
13. Can we create different themes for different user roles or departments?
Yes, themes can be configured per user role, allowing different departments or audiences to have tailored in-app experiences.
14. Is Mobile Branding a paid feature?
Yes, Mobile Branding is a paid plugin and requires a separate license. It enables you to create custom-branded versions of GA apps like Now Mobile, Agent, or Onboarding.
15. Can we skip the instance selection screen during login?
Yes, with branded apps, you can prefill the instance so users skip the instance selection and go directly to SSO or login.
16. Can we show a webpage before login for unauthenticated content?
Yes, you can configure a pre-login screen to show public-facing content like your company website or announcements.
17. How long does it take to build and deploy a branded mobile app?
Android-only: Less than a week, sometimes just hours.
iOS (public): ~1 week.
iOS (private): 2–4 weeks.
Joint Android+ iOS builds are delivered together based on the slower timeline.
18. Can we distribute branded apps privately?
Yes, branded apps can be distributed privately or via public app stores (Apple & Google).
19. Can we customise the login experience for different audiences?
Yes, you can tailor the login experience using branding and user segmentation, including custom splash screens and pre-login content.
20. Are there limitations in mobile theming compared to platform theming?
Yes, mobile theming supports only six variables, and some colours are hardcoded. However, recent updates have removed many hardcoded colours to align with Next Experience theming.
21. Can we use our corporate fonts in the mobile app?
Yes, custom fonts can be uploaded and applied via theming settings. Refer to the documentation for steps.
22. Can partners build branded apps for multiple customers?
Currently, Mobile Branding is focused on individual customers creating branded apps for internal use. Multi-customer support is under consideration.
23. Is there a video walkthrough for Mobile Publishing?
Yes, the Mobile Publishing 101 video is available on YouTube and covers setup, branding options, and deployment step
