Am I remembering things wrong? [iOS App Features]

Monzo Chat
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Am I remembering things wrong, or wasn’t part of Monzo’s original sales pitch about being app only, that they could focus on just making the best possible app, and quickly implement new mobile features such as biometric authentication etc?

If I’m not remember this wrong, they are doing a pretty poor job honouring that imho.

It’s 2024, we still don’t have an iOS widget whilst pretty much every other app out there, including my smart bathroom scales, have one. It also would seem, due to the lack of say iPad and MacOS apps, that the iOS app is developed using yesteryears tech, and haven’t embraced SwiftUI yet , which is about 5 years old at this stage.

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You’re not, but like most of what Monzo has sold to us over the years, this too was abandonware.

Initially when Monzo made that commitment and at the time of their launch, they did fulfil it. Supporting all the latest functionality and features at the time. They just never maintained doing so, and abandoned the stuff they already did.

So Siri payments went away. The widget is stuck in 2016. There’s no iMessage app. No Apple Maps usage on iOS. Among others. And likely missing some integration with some core Android APIs too.

In some (but not all) cases, it’s justified abandonware. they don’t want to support some platform specific functions that they wouldn’t be able to offer on the other platform for parity and so no particular platform can offer a superior Monzo experience over the other. That’s justified, but I think it’s also a cop out for laziness (Monzo has never had complete platform parity and likely never will) and to streamline their development at the expense of providing the best possible customer experience.

But then, on the hand, Monzo are supporting the new Apple Pay instalments feature when it launches. Being one of the first to do so.

I think when there’s a commercial interest in doing this stuff, as with Apple Pay, they’ll do it. When there isn’t and the only boon is the end user experience, they’ll play their tired cop out excuses they’ve been using for the past several years of not wanting one platform to have a superior Monzo experience over the other.

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They’ve just morphed over time into the bank being the value proposition and not the app. Which is probably the right thing.

I’d love to see true mobile enablement e.g. true multi device and a scaled iPad app. Though with the latter I can see why they’ve never bothered. If it was going to be a thing it’d have been an early doors one that improved over time.

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This is where the platform-parity people annoy me. I’d like the iOS app to be a SwiftUI app which runs across iPhone, iPad & Mac. With a totally separate native Android app, features the same across platforms where possible but also new platform-exclusive features still being adopted.

I don’t think that’s crazy when it’s only two platforms and both are quite different anyway.

Also, just look at other banks. If HSBC, for example, can manage to set up multi-device Digital Secure Key with full iPad support, Monzo can do multiple devices too.

Much like the long debate over cheque imaging, you aren’t going to win customers as a digital-first bank unless your digital offering is top class. Personally, I feel other banks are catching up with and in some cases eclipsing Monzo now in this regard. They need to stay at the forefront if they are to maintain their market niche.

I think their app is still, or probably should be, their main value proposition. Banking itself is a pretty commodified thing where lots of banks are offering similar features.

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There is zero reason for Monzo to make native apps for each platform, they already have one - if not the best - app in the UK industry

An iPad app is completely unnecessary - if anything they could develop a web app that you could use on an iPad - it’s a feature that other banks have implemented because frankly elderly people find it useful as they use iPads, atleast in my experience, the most and often have an iPad and a dumb phone

Making native apps for each platform when they already have one of the fastest apps is a completely unnecessary technical detail that 99.9% of customers won’t notice and it will also slow down their development

I get the feeling the forum was once a place to collect the main line of feedback, but now they can selectively gather feedback from portions of their millions of customers within the app. There also seems to be a trend of the top forum contributors not even using Monzo as a main bank account - and I don’t mean that in any kind of insultive way, I’m just pointing it out. The UK banks that have a SwiftUI app are both slower and less functional than Monzo

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For you

In your opinion

Source Please or is this just again your opinion - I have no idea for example how the HSBC App is built but it’s extremely stable. As is Algbra. Granted they might have less features built in.

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All of your points are fair. The source is really just my personal experience - but I feel like people saying that Monzo should make a native app are ignoring the fact they’ve hired people specifically to build in their current tech stack

I find the Monzo app stable enough, again my source for this is just my memory but I’m almost sure HSBC have had more app outages than Monzo - and is also a lot slower to launch to see my balance

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And that’s totally fine, it was more to see if there was actual research around the SwiftUI point really. I don’t believe (could be wrong) any bank has truly utilised it to it’s full potential.

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Id love to see a bank use it to its full potential - and I agree no one has yet… buts its very understandable why Monzo doesn’t want to do so

Perhaps Lloyds, Nationwide or a bank where it truly makes sense to start from scratch with the app could do so, but for Monzo the app is the product while for the other big high street banks their app is just a way of interfacing with the product

I work as a developer but I find Monzos app to be the best by far, despite other banks using technology that should be faster but implementing it into legacy slow systems - the end result is the customer is more annoyed by the app with the faster tech stack

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Oh for certain but of late it feels the core focus has been on new products, not app improvements. No, that’s not me saying they should redesign the U.I :wink:

Completely agree - in my humble opinion for an app based bank, the app experience (on any device) should absolutely be the prime value the user gains, otherwise why wouldn’t you look elsewhere, and the differentiators between competitor products is smaller.

I think this is probably a technical limitation around how Monzo built their methods of authenticating in the early days - i.e. via one time email vs digital secure key. I’m no developer but to me it seems this is why they’ve either not decided or, or can’t implement multi-device single user authentication.

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I’d imagine developer time has to be justified by (potential) economic gain for Monzo now, unlike the Mondo days of “build fast and break stuff”

Since they already have an app that beats most of the others (for their target customer range), then completely disrupting the development team they’ve gone out to hire for their current stack doesn’t make much sense - in fact it means the features they want to make will take longer (more money) to make

It’s a lose lose for everyone other than the developer who gets excited seeing someone finally adopt the technology but really sees very little benefit - but will also be the first to complain when features take longer to make and two different versions of the app for different platforms inevitably have different functionality and features

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Which banking app is using swift ui?

I think the issue is that Monzo are the standard for the rest of the industry, for better or worse. They’re the baseline banks are compared to for this stuff, but they’re no longer the leader IMO.

So if Monzo isn’t innovating, there’s little interest or need for the rest of the industry to follow. I think we’re back at the time where NatWest are once again the industry leader here (might change when Revolut are a proper bank), closely followed by the regulator.

Monzo is firmly in big bank attitude now. The fintech revolution is over. The banks won. All that changed is Monzo and Starling are now among them, and now fintech is mostly just fin without the tech. The tech part occasionally shines through still at times, and I love when that happens (the new security features), but it has otherwise stopped evolving.

Revolut is, I think, the only realisation of the fintech promise alive and well in the UK now. And that’s a shame because their execution is sloppy. They’re the Uber of this industry (always hated that line).

Without another revolution, I think we’re stuck with what we’ve got. I still believe the basic stuff (like an iPad app and a web app) are an eventuality that will be, at some point, necessary to support. For the same reason check imaging finally happened. But those things aren’t really the sort of things we’re talking about here.

With all that said though, I can’t help but feel that this is the cornerstone of a much larger issue in the industry that has resulted in a growing sentiment of exhaustion with where both Monzo and the industry has wound up. Dare I say it’s the root cause of the loss of voices from valuable contributors, both within this community, and the larger fintech community as a whole. Those who cared the most, believed in the fintech promise the most, feel like their voice falls on deaf ears now when it was once the treasured pillar of the movement, so they no longer offer it. The tech part of fintech feels like it’s been lost. The imagination, vision, all lost.

I remember the excitement I felt when I first discovered Simple in 2012. How I longed for that to become the future of banking. Here we are, 12 years later. It never happened and the dream feels dead. The promise remains unfulfilled. Stuck in 2016. It sucks.

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Is it the right thing for them though? To have the bank as the main value proposition? If I look at my HSBC account, pretty much everything is on par, or superior from an actual banking perspective. Credit card limits are significantly higher, overdraft larger, they got mortgages, international accounts, vastly more mature investment accounts, the list goes on.

Monzo feels a bit like a “baby” bank in comparison, that you use for the app experience and to split your bill with your friends on a night out :laughing:

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As least you know when you’ve made a previous transaction on Monzo, not a date 4 days later once it clears like most.

Saying that I mainly use Nationwide CC which also does this.

Everything ends up in a phase of diluted and incremental innovation as new parts of a market matures, as per the Innovation S-Curve. It’s just difficult to find another product other than an app to create another curve to drive innovation further in this market, hence the limitations.

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This elderly (almost 71) has an iMac, an iPad, an iPhone and two MacBooks. Quite happy to stick with my iPhone for Monzo.

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