One recent morning, Ivan Sandul, a 28-year-old truck driver from Sacramento, Calif., found himself wishing there was an app to make his job easier.

After driving a load of machine parts more than 3,000 miles from California and dropping it off in Canada, he was up at dawn, working the phone from a parking spot in upstate New York, trying to find a load to help begin paying the cost of his return trip home. On his fifth call, he found a freight broker looking for a driver to haul a load of metal from a nearby recycling plant to Ohio.

“I said, ‘I’ll take it. I’m not going to wait any longer,’” Mr. Sandul said. “’I have to get moving.’”

Even as thousands of jobs in the transportation sector, from ticket-takers on commuter trains to delivery agents for the U.S.’s biggest parcel services, have been transformed by mobile technology, trucking has remained stubbornly low-tech.

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